[redis_mlc]

Yes, that's a fact. I can't tell whether you approve of that or not, but here's the background.

After the failure of the Treaty of Versailles at the end of of WW1, resulting in WW2, the Allies learned that unconditional surrender was needed to prevent future wars.

The Japanese military command preferred that their troops never surrender.

So the 2 options the US had were:

1) Curtis LeMay would use 10,000 bombers to napalm those cities, and every last village in Japan.

2) Use 2 nuclear weapons and demand a surrender. The military commanders in Washington debated the ethics of using such weapons, so this wasn't done lightly.

Having studied this over a period of years, #2 makes the most sense to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay

[monocasa]

Except the Japanese didn't have the context to know the implications of the nuclear bombs. And the contemporaries noted that it was the Soviet declaration of war and invasion of Manchuria that forced their hand. The use of atomic bombs was superfluous.

[ngold]

That is an often overlooked part of the equation. If I remember correctly, Japan was a week or two away from being split in two like germany.

And Japan and the Soviet Union had been at each others throats since before there was a Soviet Union and Japan thumped the tsar.

I am sure Japan did not want to surrender under a Soviet flag that was looking for 50 years of retribution.

In a strange way it was an American coup to get peace signed before Russia started stripping the place down to the bone.