Wars are won by making the cost of continuing it so great that the enemy stops fighting and surrenders. Without those two nukes, Japan would have continued to fight for months if not years. But truthfully, Japan did attempt to negotiate a conditional surrender and were rebuffed.
-—”Wars are won by making the cost of continuing it so great that the enemy stops fighting and surrenders.”-—
As General Sherman astutely observed, there’s little use trying to “reform” war. It’s terrible by definition, and the worse you make it, the sooner it’ll be over.
The Japanese war crimes were such that a negotiated peace was never an option (yet in the end, the surrender had conditions.). Had China not gone red, the Japanese would have been held similar disdain as the Nazis.
The complete turnaround of our positions with Germany and Japan simply reinforces the Smedley Butler proposition that it was all a racket. A racket gone horribly bad, but it remains a racket today.
Yes...and no. Mid level Japanese diplomats were trying to work through the Japanese embassy in Moscow to get Stalin to broker a deal. Of course, Stalin wasn't going to be an honest broker as he'd already promised to enter the war against Japan. However, the "conditional surrender" these Japanese had in mind was that the Japanese would continue to occupy China, there would be no demilitarization of the Imperial armed forces or occupation of the Home Islands. In addition to being a total non-starter, it never had the endorsement of the Japanese government. Therefore, that plan, or any plan, was never formally offered.
It was only after the bombs (and yes, it took two to convince the Japanese that the first one was not a one-off deal) that the Japanese then offered unconditional surrender, that does not abrogate the prerogatives of the Emperor. Or something like that, which we accepted. The best source of the end of the war against Japan is Richard Frank's "Downfall," where he lays all this out in great detail.