King's College London
Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives

Nuclear History Database

Records held at the Public Record Office Kew

UK Atomic Energy Authority records:

AB15 Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Harwell; reports and memoranda, 1940-1971

6535 files, reports and booklets

The system of numbering AERE documents in report and memoranda series was not introduced until 1947 with the report series starting at number 100. The numbering of reports in a single series was controlled from a register in the main Library by the Reproduction Section; the Divisions each numbered their own memoranda and as many did not go through the Reproduction section, this series is not complete. Until 1958 the Divisional prefix was inserted before the R or M number: since that time the memoranda numbering has also been controlled by a Library register and the Divisional prefixes have been dropped.

The prefixes are as follows:

The Extramural reports are mainly progress reports submitted by various contractors and some were catalogued in the report series while others were catalogued in a miscellaneous series and given the prefix HAR; in 1951 this type of report was given an X/PR reference. In this list, all reports submitted by external organisations have been listed together under the name of the organisation concerned: piece nos 186 to 192 are documents which were issued without any individual reference numbers .

Until January 1949 the Electronics Division was based at the Telecommunications Research Establishment and piece nos 1 to 13 are a mixture of Atomic Energy Research Establishment and Telecommunications Research Establishment references. The records in this class are open without restriction unless otherwise stated.

Also included are some copies of reports of the National Physical Laboratory, the Chemical Research Laboratory and the Radiochemical Centre, Amersham. Papers and correspondence related to these reports can be found in other classes of Harwell records, AB6, AB12 and AB50-AB58.