I dissent
the alternative was “no mainland invasion”
Some of our clueless military leaders also made the same suggestion before and after the atomic bombings. There are numerous reasons why doing so would have sacrificed many more lives, not less. One of the foremost reasons were the Japanese plans to murder the Allied prisoners of war en-masse.
On Wake Island, the Japanese commander ordered the beheadings of all of the American civilian construction workers to prevent their recapture when an American naval task force conducted a naval bombardment of Wake. The Japanese commander wrongly assumed the bombardment indicated an iminent amphibious invasion of Wake Island.
In Indonesia and elsewhere the Japanese herded Anglo-American prisoners of war into air raid trenches and other such confined spaces, poured in aviation fuel or other gasolines, and burned the men alive to prevent rescue or for revenge.
Some of japan’s highest ranking military officers ordered preparations to be made for the murder of all Allied prisoners of war, military and civilian along with millions of other people in the Japanese occupied zones. Emperor Hirohito found it necessary to dispatch his own brother, a royal prince of the Empire, to China and Indo-China in a dangerously risky attempt to countermand those murderous orders. Even after the atomic bombings of Japan, these murderous Japanese officers conspired to kidnap the Emperor to prevent the surrender, prolong the struggle, and murder the prisoners of war and countless other people at risk of japanese revenge.
In the end, the loss of Japanese lives were a small fraction of the human lives the Japanese were about to destroy in the most barbarous means imaginable just among the prisoners of war, neutrals, and civilians in the occupied zones. These are lives that are seldom even mentioned much less taken into consideration when the number of Japanese and Anglo-American lives were to be lost by a direct invasion of the Japanese Home islands. So, even if there had been no invasion, the surrender was secured by naval blockade, there still would have been a worse loss of life committed by japanese atrocities. These losses were forestalled by the atomic bomb attacks.
There was no hope of avoiding defeat after the Soviet declaration of war and invasion of Manchuria. Surrender was rational to save their Asian forces and the home island from certain destruction. Truman (as recorded in his diary and by others) was well aware that the Japanese were hopelessly defeated and seeking terms of surrender.
The bombings were the first shot in the Cold War that simultaneously allowed the Japanese to claim victim status and dismiss their own barbarity. The international perspective is definitely a credible argument.