William Jenkins Wilcox Jr.

William Jenkins Wilcox Jr. (January 26, 1923 – September 2, 2013) was an American chemist and nuclear weapons historian. During World War II he worked on the Manhattan Project at the Clinton Engineer Works. After the war, he headed the research and development work there as the technical director of Union Carbide's Nuclear Division at the K-25 and Y-12 plants. He became the honorary Oak Ridge City historian and headed the effort to gather oral history accounts of the Manhattan Project.

Biography William Jenkins Wilcox Jr. was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on January 26, 1923, the son of William J. Wilcox Sr., an attorney, and his wife Kitty Rogers. Wilcox grew up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where he graduated from Allentown High School. He then entered Washington and Lee University, where he majored in chemistry and graduated with honors in 1943.

In May 1943, Wilcox joined the Manhattan Project, working for Tennessee Eastman in Rochester, New York, on uranium purification processes. In October of that year he went to the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where he led the Beta chemistry group at the Y-12 plant, although as a chemist he never saw the calutrons there that performed the uranium enrichment until after the war. In February 1944, he was the chemist who prepared the first shipment of highly enriched uranium.

After the war, he remained in Oak Ridge, where he worked in the Analytical Chemistry Division at Y-12 and established a statistical quality control program. He was successively a research chemist, technical assistant, physics department head, and division director for gaseous diffusion and gas centrifuge at K-25. He was the technical director of Union Carbides Nuclear Division for twelve years, during which he headed the research and development efforts at both the K-25 and Y-12 plants. In 1958, he graduated from the University of Tennessee with a master's degree in industrial management.

Wilcox died at NHC Healthcare of Oak Ridge on September 2, 2013.