Nicolas Hardy Walter (22 November 1934 – 7 March 2000) was a British anarchist and atheist writer, speaker and activist.

Nicolas was the son of Katherine Monica (née Ratcliffe) and William Grey Walter, an American-born British neurophysiologist, cybernetician and robotician.

His paternal grandfather was Karl Walter (1880-1965), a journalist, writer and translator who worked for the Kansas City Star and the Horace Plunkett Foundation.

After his parents divorced in 1945, his mother Monica (1911-2012) subsequently married a Cambridge University scientist Arnold Beck[2] with whom she brought up Nicolas.

He served two years National Service in the Royal Air Force, where he learned Russian prior to working in Signals Intelligence, and then read modern history at Exeter College, Oxford.

6 (RSG-6), copied documents relating to the Government's plans in the event of nuclear war and distributed 3,000 leaflets revealing their contents.

As Prime Minister Harold Wilson read the lesson (on the subject of beating swords into ploughshares) at a Labour Party service at the Methodist Church in Brighton, Walter and friends interrupted by shouting "Hypocrite!

Walter was appointed Managing Editor of the Rationalist Press Association in 1975, but his progressive disability and the fact he was not, as Bill Cooke puts it, "a born administrator"[10] led to difficulties.

In 1989, in the aftermath of the fatwa on Salman Rushdie and his book The Satanic Verses, Walter (along with William McIlroy) re-formed The Committee Against Blasphemy Law.