Here's our man -- Marvin the Martian. He first appeared in 1948. He is going to blow up the Earth with Uranium PU 36. The PU was pronounced by Mel Blanc as "pew," which sounds like the number 2. Put it altogether and you have, pew! uranium 236, which is close to what will go in a nuclear reactor -- usually U235. But also, plutonium 239 is Pu239. So there you go with the pew factor. And that is what goes in a warhead. No wonder Merry Melodies later changed the uranium to "Illudium PU 36." Talk of uranium was too creepy. Especially when you combine that with talk of blowing up the Earth. The melodies were supposed to be merry, guys! 

Now, consider this: May 26, 1958. Eisenhower made a speech and officially marked the opening of Shippingport Atomic Power Plant in western Pennsylvania. This was our first commercial nuclear power plant. It ran on pellets of thorium dioxide and uranium 233. This was in the papers and on the news programs. This was Chuck Parker's world. It was going nuclear. The family had already gone nuclear, why shouldn't your power company? Also, out west, near San Francisco, California was the Vallecitos Nuclear Center which from October 1957 to December 1963 was cranking out electricity. But as early as 1954 the Navy had a submarine powered by atomic energy: the USS Nautilus. So nuclear power meant, bombs, subs, lights, refrigerators, TVs and the family itself.