The winner of the world’s biggest mathematics prize, who did pioneering work developing nuclear weapons, said on Tuesday that the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan 60 years ago prevented further World War II bloodshed.
Peter Lax, in Oslo to receive the $980,000 Abel Prize for mathematics, said that working as a 19-year-old student on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, N.M., felt like living in a science-fiction plot.
“The original use of the bomb on Japan I think was justified,” the Hungarian-American mathematician told Reuters, stepping into the controversy that has raged over the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
Considering the alternative
He said the alternative of a U.S. invasion of Japan would have been “far bloodier” than the 1944 Allied landings in Normandy, France, that paved the way to the defeat of Hitler. “It was all ended (in Japan) by dropping the bomb,” he said.
“And there’s another aspect that occurred to me much later ... the horror that humanity has of nuclear weapons comes partly because we have seen what it can do,” said the 79-year-old Lax. “It was a kind of inoculation of humanity against using nuclear weapons.”
The bombs killed about 140,000 people in Hiroshima and 70,000 in Nagasaki by the end of 1945, and thousands of others died later from illness and injuries. Many other experts argue that the bombs were among the great evils of the 20th century.
President Truman saw the atom bomb as a way of reducing casualties in the war after fierce battles in the Japanese islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
Famed for equations
Lax, who is now affiliated with the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University, won fame for work on equations that have had applications ranging from how to pump more oil from underground reservoirs to improved aerodynamics for planes.
The Abel Prize was named after 19th-century Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel and set up in 2003 to promote math, reward excellence, and fill a gap left by the Nobel Prizes for science that are awarded in Stockholm.
Lax won the prize “for his groundbreaking contributions to the theory and application of partial differential equations and to the computation of their solutions,” the prize citation said.
Summer job
As a promising student, Lax was drafted in 1945 to the Manhattan Project in New Mexico. He returned to Los Alamos in 1950 for a year for work linked to the hydrogen bomb and worked there each summer for a decade after the war.
He said he had no idea where he was going when drafted. “Security was uppermost: Nobody had any idea of what was going on. Once I got inside the fence, I was told we were building a bomb out of plutonium, which is an element that didn’t exist,” he said.
“By the time I got there the design of the bomb had been frozen for some time. But they were continuing working on future bombs,” he said. “It was like living science fiction. ... I don’t read very much science fiction, having lived it.”
