I think using the bombs with the information the US had at the time was justified. From the information the US had, Japan had a quite credible claim that they would "never" surrender unconditionally, though lots of Japanese people and military units would surrender even if Japan itself officially did not, making it not literally "never". With nuclear bombs the US could have kept hitting them with increasing levels of force, probably not possible with conventional bombs. If the war had continued until 1950 most of inhabited Japan would have been destroyed, and the US would have won even without a single surrender.

Fascinating article. Website is awful though. Here's the article without auto-playing video, missing ads, page crashing, and paragraphs of text randomly jumping around the page: https://archive.ph/HkeMn

Even if the Soviet Union had remained neutral, Japan would have certainly surrendered within a few more months after some more atomic bombs. No nation could possibly sustain a war effort while losing a major city every few weeks.

  >     Many Japanese soldiers were soon on their way home from their bases
  > around Japan and were beginning to crowd the trains and buses.  It was
  > difficult for some of them to understand the surrender.  Although most of
  > the Japanese army in the field was still unbeaten, it was stretched thin
  > all across Asia.  The string of horrendous losses at Leyte, Iwo Jima,
  > Saipan, and Okinawa and America's superior air power against the home
  > islands and the use of atomic weapons were evidence enough that the war
  > could not be won.  And then, of course, when the Soviet Union entered the
  > war against Japan after the Hiroshima bomb, there was great fear that our
  > old hypothetical enemy would take advantage of our weakened condition and
  > try to occupy us.  The Soviets seized the southern half of Sakhalin island
  > and four islands just north of Hokkaido - the closest one is in sight of
  > the Japanese mainland - and they still hold them today.  The United States
  > returned Okinawa, which they seized in 1945, to Japanese sovereignty in
  > 1972.
  >
  >     In 1945 the Russians stormed into Manchuria - our buffer against them
  > for so many years - when our forces were relatively small and weakened,
  > unable to defend against massive Russian armor.  There was chaos as
  > Japanese civilians and soldiers tried to escape from the Russians, but in
  > the end about five hundred thousand Japanese soldiers were taken prisoner
  > and sent to labor camps in Siberia and other places in the Soviet Union.
  > Some of them remained prisoners and virtual slave laborers for as long as
  > twelve years.
  >  ...
  > There are those who say to this day that the emperor's decision to
  > surrender was brought about almost as much by the fear of the Soviets - the
  > fear that they might invade the home islands or partition the country, as
  > had been done to Germany - as by the horrible events at Hiroshima and
  > Nagasaki.
  >
  > - MADE IN JAPAN AKIO MORITA and SONY (c) 1986  (any typos are mine)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1008101.Made_in_Japan

It's incorrect, in that the Japanese didn't offer surrender until after the nuclear bombs.

This article sounds laughably insane to me, not a historian but hear me out anyway

Japan wanted to surrender:

> “But, in 1965, historian Gar Alperovitz argued that, although the bombs did force an immediate end to the war, Japan’s leaders had wanted to surrender anyway and likely would have done so before the American invasion planned for Nov. 1.”

Or maybe not ? Which is it ?

> “Japan’s leaders had not seriously considered surrendering prior to that day.”

Japan’s leaders were worried about the divinity of the Emperor. Insane to believe these people inhabited the 20th century at the same time the Nuclear bomb was developed:

> “What if they decided to put the emperor—who was believed to be divine—on trial? What if they got rid of the emperor and changed the form of government entirely?”

They had their own nuclear program:

> Third, the Japanese military understood, at least in a rough way, what nuclear weapons were. Japan had a nuclear weapons program.

The US (not Stalin) was having their way with Japan through the summer of 1945:

> In the summer of 1945, the U.S. Army Air Force carried out one of the most intense campaigns of city destruction in the history of the world. Sixty-eight cities in Japan were attacked and all of them were either partially or completely destroyed.

Japan’s junta didn’t care about it’s citizens:

> Japan’s leaders consistently displayed disinterest in the city bombing that was wrecking their cities.

They should have been Mussolini’d along with the Emperor

AKA the find out stage:

> The Japanese were in a relatively difficult strategic situation. They were nearing the end of a war they were losing. Conditions were bad.

No shit sherlock - they couldn’t even project power beyond their island

But, they had two plans! How had the other plans been going so far ? Doesn’t matter:

You know shot is bad when you have two plans to surrender:

> They had two plans for getting better surrender terms; they had, in other words, two strategic options. The first was diplomatic. Japan had signed a five-year neutrality pact with the Soviets in April of 1941, which would expire in 1946. A group consisting mostly of civilian leaders and led by Foreign Minister Togo Shigenori hoped that Stalin…

OME You must have been truly desperate to come to Stalin for help in 1945

> The second plan was military.. They hoped to use Imperial Army ground troops to inflict high casualties on U.S. forces when they invaded.

Hope is not a strategy

> It didn’t take a military genius to see that, while it might be possible to fight a decisive battle against one great power invading from one direction, it would not be possible to fight off two great powers attacking from two different directions.

Hmm where had we seen this before

> Japanese intelligence was predicting that U.S. forces might not invade for months.

Did they predict that they would lose their Navy and have two atomic bombs dropped on their home land ?

Anyways, we are supposed to believe that based on this timeline,

Aug 6 - Hiroshima Aug 8 - Stalin invades China Aug 9 - Nagasaki Aug 11 - Hirohito surrenders

after getting blown to pieces on their own home islands, with no Navy, Stalin invading China was somehow the final straw.

That garbage piece of writing completely ignores nearly 80 years of conventional history which includes first-hand account from the very Japanese council cited in the story.

Absolute joke content that doesn’t belong on a site like this.