This, once again, was the spring of 1944. At that very moment, grave-looking scientists in remote desert bunkers were smoking cigarettes, poring over blueprints, and ordering shipments of uranium-235. When the powers-that-be got wind of the fact that Warner Bros. had independently invented the atomic bomb, shady departments flew into action. The cartoon was pulled, not to see the light of day until some years after the war, and the filmmakers, who had no clue as to what was happening, suddenly found themselves in the middle of a poorly written spy thriller, complete with intimidating visits from government spooks in homburgs and trench coats. There were no prosecutions, of course. How could there have been? To do so would have meant acknowledging the existence of the Manhattan Project over a year before the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Not to mention that this was no conspiracy, but rather an accident of ink, paint, and imagination. All the same, this chance unveiling reminds us that cartoons are themselves sites of fusion, crucibles where technology, violence, and creativity combine in ways that collapse the divide between reality and fantasy, leaving us to ponder which is more disturbing: the fact that these comic minds could randomly hit upon the most significant breakthrough in modern warfare, or that the scientists responsible for designing and building the most destructive weapon in human history — a device capable of eradicating all life on Earth in the blink of an eye — seemed to share so much in common with the creator of Wile E. Coyote.