Word: buna
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...great Rubber Scandal, far from being solved, moved into an even dizzier confusion, a Wonderland where jabberwocky jive talk about buna, butyl and guayule was the only language spoken...
...first step was to move a landing force from his ill-selected, oft-bombed positions at Lae and Salamaua (see map), barred from Port Moresby by great mountains. He would set the force down at Buna, near the head of a mountain road, primitive but passable, that led across to Port Moresby. Thus he could get at the thorn. Once he got rid of the thorn, he could launch his attack at thinly held northern Australia or spread east through the flanking island chain as his restless, never-idle sense of movement dictated...
...wheat hullabaloo has nevertheless served a useful purpose: as the sights for the buna program were raised again & again after Pearl Harbor, they finally pointed so high that the capacity of the petroleum industry to produce suddenly became a question. The 220,000 tons of wheat-alcohol rubber will make up the difference at the same time that it helps overrule the farm bloc's conviction that big business has been blocking it out of the program...
Petroleum Technologies messed up the buna raw-materials program, too. The basic refinery raw material for butadiene is butylene, and butylene can be had either circuitously by extracting it from butane (natural gas) or directly, by skimming it off refinery gas. For the first five months after Pearl Harbor it looked as if the refineries couldn't skim off nearly enough butylene without at the same time losing out on their necessary production of high octane gas. That threw them back, willy-nilly, on butane, even though it takes much more steel and money...
...buna program's troubles stemmed from such high considerations. Some plain old-fashioned competitive jealousies were also involved. The refiners had borne the brunt of butadiene research, were miffed because the rubber companies got buna from butadiene on. The chemical companies, scheduled to produce styrene, alcohol and alcohol-butadiene, didn't want to share secrets with the oil companies who had the original know-how. The little rubber companies were sore because they felt the Big Four of Rubber were hogging their end of the program...