Unconditional surrender (what the Allies were demanding) was a bitter pill to swallow. The United States and Great Britain were already convening war crimes trials in Europe. 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? Even though the situation was bad in the summer of 1945, the leaders of Japan were not willing to consider giving up their traditions, their beliefs, or their way of life. Until Aug. 9. What could have happened that caused them to so suddenly and decisively change their minds? What made them sit down to seriously discuss surrender for the first time after 14 years of war?
It could not have been Nagasaki. The bombing of Nagasaki occurred in the late morning of Aug. 9, after the Supreme Council had already begun meeting to discuss surrender, and word of the bombing only reached Japan’s leaders in the early afternoon—after the meeting of the Supreme Council had been adjourned in deadlock and the full cabinet had been called to take up the discussion. Based on timing alone, Nagasaki can’t have been what motivated them.
Hiroshima isn’t a very good candidate either. It came 74 hours—more than three days—earlier. What kind of crisis takes three days to unfold? The hallmark of a crisis is a sense of impending disaster and the overwhelming desire to take action now. How could Japan’s leaders have felt that Hiroshima touched off a crisis and yet not meet to talk about the problem for three days?
Have 70 years of nuclear policy been based on a lie?
foreignpolicy.com
This article is a good summary of all the problems with the "atomic bomb forced Japanese surrender" premise.
Here's another excerpt that talks about the destructive power being a non factor.
We often imagine, because of the way the story is told, that the bombing of Hiroshima was far worse. We imagine that the number of people killed was off the charts. But if you graph the number of people killed in all 68 cities bombed in the summer of 1945, you find that Hiroshima was second in terms of civilian deaths. If you chart the number of square miles destroyed, you find that Hiroshima was fourth. If you chart the percentage of the city destroyed, Hiroshima was 17th. Hiroshima was clearly within the parameters of the conventional attacks carried out that summer.
From our perspective, Hiroshima seems singular, extraordinary. But if you put yourself in the shoes of Japan’s leaders in the three weeks leading up to the attack on Hiroshima, the picture is considerably different. If you were one of the key members of Japan’s government in late July and early August, your experience of city bombing would have been something like this: On the morning of July 17, you would have been greeted by reports that during the night four cities had been attacked: Oita, Hiratsuka, Numazu, and Kuwana. Of these, Oita and Hiratsuka were more than 50 percent destroyed. Kuwana was more than 75 percent destroyed and Numazu was hit even more severely, with something like 90 percent of the city burned to the ground.
Three days later you have woken to find that three more cities had been attacked. Fukui was more than 80 percent destroyed. A week later and three more cities have been attacked during the night. Two days later and six more cities were attacked in one night, including Ichinomiya, which was 75 percent destroyed.
The one thing that is almost never talked about is that its politically difficult to go against the established narrative because you would have to acknowledge that the 1st bombing was unnecessary. And even if you argue that it was because US had no idea that Russia was invading or what Japanese intentions were, you're still faced with defending the 2nd bombing which was absolutely unnecessary as Russia had invaded Manchuria the day before. Its self-explanatory why US can never acknowledge this truth, but Japanese leaders can't acknowledge it either as they became willing US patsies in the postwar years.
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I've always been told that Japan had to be nuked solely because "they were willing to fight to the last man".
I fully believe they were going to surrender once Russia was in Manchuria, after seeing what Russia did to Germany once troops crossed into it. Japan was in for a world of pain if Russia crossed their borders.
It's hard to make that argument though when half their politicians and most of their military brass really did want to fight to the end though.
At the end of the day I would say that if they weren't nuked, a surrender was on the way that very week, but I can't say that 100%. I also think the US wanted to test their new weapon no matter what happened and with how much anti-Asian sentiment there was in the US, Japan was a prime target to light up.
Which is why the true reason for Japanese surrender will never be acknowledged, nor given credit to Russia
Russia has never gotten any credit for WW2 and it's pretty fucked up considering they sacrificed 30,000,000 people holding off the Nazis while the United States sat around with its thumb up its ass waiting to see who'd pull ahead before they got militarily involved. If it came down to it I think most of the US government would have rather seen the Nazis win than the Commies. Germany engaging GBR put the US in a bad spot though where they kinda had to do something eventually.
Japanese had their own nuclear weapons program
That reminds me, in the Oppenheimer trailer, it said something about developing the bomb before the Nazis did, or that the Nazis were working on it too.
I was under the impression that Hitler basically cancelled their nuclear weapons program (which didn't get very far anyway) because he didn't want to irradiate/poison the land they needed for
lebensraum. So this wasn't even a real threat and was debatably another Hitler mistake, like war on two fronts, rejecting the USSR's attempt to join the Axis, moving troops away from the eastern front despite generals telling him not to, etc etc etc because his brain was so addled by all the fucking morphine.
Tangent: If Germany had bided its time and started WW2 in 1949 instead of 1939, they would have probably run over everyone (except the USSR) at the rate they were progressing technologically. Keeping the USSR and possibly US as allies and just taking over Europe/Middle-East etc would have also worked out more in their favor. GBR and USSR were probably the two other strongest countries in the world circa 1939 and that's who they picked a two-front fight with?
Back to the point, surprised if the movie portrays this as a race with the Nazis when that wasn't the case, unless I completely misunderstood "Hitler cancelled their program" all these years. Also as I understand it, not only did their program not get that far, but even if it had continued it would have ended up producing something more akin to a "Dirty Bomb", very different from what we eventually produced.
