[colorado tanker]

Another of the many virtues of this day by day format (and chajin's posts) is that the lesson has been driven home to me even more forcefully that the senior Japanese leaders all recognized the war was lost but have been deadlocked for months how to end it. They will even remain deadlocked after the Hiroshima bomb.

I agree a lot of the mythology around the bombs has been created by lefties pursuing an agenda. I think another aspect of it, however, is cultural misunderstanding, which I think led to Ike, Stimson and others misreading the situation. They're thinking is that Japan is defeated, the Japanese know it, their country is being systematically destroyed, their people are starving and they have sent out peacefeelers. So, of course they would have surrendered without dropping the bombs, right? Wrong. Westerners would have surrendered, but the Big Six are still deadlocked.

[henkster]

What, other than dropping the bombs, would have broken the psychological deadlock? Would the USSR’s entry into the war have been sufficient?

We will never know definitively, of course. But as things stand in today’s Times, that deadlock shows no sign of breaking for peace.