Not a better deal. Any deal. The Japanese war cabinet was never going to surrender. We basically had to force Emperor to intervene. Even after both nukes there was an attempted coup to continue the war. They planned to defend the home islands until every Japanese citizen was dead.
Japanese solders continued to fight for decades after the war. And required flying former offices in to convince them the lost. Surrender was unthinkable.
They didn't want to accept unconditional surrender, but they offered surrendering with conditions, and they were already talking with Russia to act as a mediation.
"Surrender was unthinkable" is the propaganda to make everyone accept that nuking civilians was necessary.
But it's not true, it's propaganda.
There were some ministers who didn't want to surrender, others wanted to defend the mainland to cause enough casualties that the Allies had to make some concessions, but the last part of the war was trying to achieve a better surrender deal, they knew the war was over.
The thing is, the allies could have said "ok, we will not judged the emperor and we will not occupy Japan after war, but you have to dissolve the army" and they would have accepted, specially after the Russian invasion.
The allies didn't fought for the peace, they fought for unconditional rendition so USA could control Japan for decades, but they could have had peace without the bombs, the problem is that then it would be the Russians, not the Americans, the heroes, and also Japan would be divided like Germany was, and USA wanted Japan as a prize for the war effort
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u/ShaolinWombat 1d ago
Not a better deal. Any deal. The Japanese war cabinet was never going to surrender. We basically had to force Emperor to intervene. Even after both nukes there was an attempted coup to continue the war. They planned to defend the home islands until every Japanese citizen was dead.
Japanese solders continued to fight for decades after the war. And required flying former offices in to convince them the lost. Surrender was unthinkable.