Documents and related materials associated with the contents and the origin of the Los Alamos technical series and the national nuclear energy series

摘要

The rationale for preparing this document arose from the fact that the author (who worked in D-Building during WWII) was asked to contribute a short article on 'Plutonium Metallurgy at Los Alamos During the War' for inclusion in the 50th anniversary book, 'Behind Tall Fences,' published in 1993 by the J.R. Oppenheimer Memorial Committee. I agreed, believing that all of the source material needed was readily available in the Los Alamos Technical Series, a detailed account of all of the R&D carried out at Los Alamos from 1943 to 1945. The obvious place to start was the LANL Report Library. As will be seen by the perusing the following memoranda and reports (which were assembled one at a time by following up successive leads), it finally turned out that, of all six chapters of Vol. 10, 'Metallurgy,' of which Cyril S. Smith was the general editor, the only one 'not yet issued' was Chapter I on 'Plutonium Metallurgy,' which had been assigned to Eric R. Jette, the wartime Group Leader of the Plutonium Metallurgy Group. Jette left Los Alamos at the end of August 1956 to join the Union Carbide Research Institute in Tarrytown, New York, where he was director until June 1962 when he retired to his valley home in Pojoaque. In February 1963, he was awarded the US Atomic Energy Commission citation for meritorious contributions to the Nuclear Energy Program; shortly thereafter he died. Before accepting the fact that Chapter I did not exist, the present author undertook to find out as much as possible about the Los Alamos Technical Series, including the circumstances relating to its preparation. The related memos, etc., once retrieved, seemed worth preserving in a single report-hence this document.