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"You're dead wrong. The military forces were losing control of the war effort after MidWay.

The more rational Japanese leaders knew that the war effort was doomed. "

Hell's Bells, man, read some history! Losing control after Midway??!! Midway was June 1942. A full three years later Japanese soldiers AND citizens were fighting to the death on Iwo and Okinawa. Where were those "rational" Japanese leaders? We lost some 20,000 killed in those two campaigns. The Japanese lost 10 times as many. You might as well argue Germany was doomed after El Alamein and all battles after wards were unnecessary. If only Hitler had seen the writing on the wall hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers may have survived the war instead of dying at Anzio, on Omaha Beach, in the Bocage, in the Ardennes, in B-17s or Lancasters over Germany, etc..

If we had invaded Japan in late 1945 - as we would have had to do since Tojo and Hirohito were no more willing to compromise than Hitler and Goering - we would have lost a minimum of 50,000 killed and probably several times that. The casualty ratio would have been similar to Okinawa, so at least 500,000 Japanese would have died. Would it have been better that they died in battle?

The Japanese unleashed a war of conquest on Southern Asia. They showed no mercy in Nanking. Read "The Rape of Nanking" by Iris Chang and tell me where those "rational" Japanese leaders were during that atrocity. How many Chinese would have died in just three more months of hostilities? How many Vietnamese, Indonesians, Filipinos, Malaysians, Burmese, and Koreans would have been killed, enslaved, forced into prostitution, etc. in just three more months of war?

How many more Japanese soldiers, sailors and airmen would have died in three more months of a war you claim was over in June 1943? How many of these Japanese military personnel would have died fighting Stalin's troops, who would have joined the war whether the bombs dropped or not? How many more citizens of Japan would have died of disease and starvation, two years of which had done nothing to persuade the "rational" Japanese leaders to end their war of conquest?

If you add the number of Allied military personnel who would have died in an invasion, the number of Japanese who would have died resisting that invasion, the number of Koreans, Chinese, Thais, etc. who would have died in several more months of brutal Japanese occupation, the numbers of Soviet troops killed to gain Stalin more territory in the Far East, and the cost in lives of another year of maintaining the U.S. war machine thousands of miles from home, the number you would get would be pushing a million. Surely such a large number would have made those "rational" Japanese leaders surrender, wouldn't it?

My answer to that is that clear: it would not have made them surrender because the Japanese War of Conquest had killed several million total and well over a million Japanese just since Midway, and that had not led them to surrender.

President Truman probably never looked beyond the projected cost in American and British lives when he chose to avoid the specter of invasion by using the bombs. Perhaps if those "rational" Japanese leaders had chosen to be as niggardly with Japanese lives as Truman was with American lives the war would have ended six months before Midway on December 6, 1941.