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At this point I just want to add: even two atomic bombs AND an invasion by the Soviets was not, by itself, enough to convince the Japanese to embrace unconditional surrender. That's how tough the "unconditional" desire was! They were willing to give up a lot, but not the Emperor.
While the US kept up conventional bombing, within Japan there were deep divisions about what to do next. There was an attempted coup by junior officers opposed to surrender, which was put down. Finally, on August 14, Hirohito personally intervened and agreed to "unconditional."
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Different historians give more or less emphasis to different aspects of this, but I think the above is mostly uncontroversial as a timeline. The controversial stuff are the interpretations. Was Hiroshima necessary? What about Nagasaki? Would the war have ended without either?
I don't want to make it sound like I have all the answers — I don't. I do want to emphasize that this has been in debate since 1945. It's not a crazy revisionist thing to question the orthodox narrative; even the US military analysts questioned it in 1945: http://www.anesi.com/ussbs01.htm#jstetw …pic.twitter.com/nDeBoHydaz
I'll note, as an aside, that the US invasion of Kyushu was not to start until November 1945. Some accounts make it sound it was going to happen the next day or something, that it was barely avoided. This is wrong; there were 2 more months there.
Personally, I think the balance of evidence points against Nagasaki playing a big role, but the "mix" of Hiroshima and the Soviet invasion is tough to disentangle. There's evidence that the Soviet invasion mattered a lot. But that's not the same as saying Hiroshima didn't.
What I do think a balanced account of the timeline indicates, though, is how inadequate the simplistic "two bombs and surrender" version of the story is. It's much more complex than that, much less straightforward, and doesn't lean into easy propaganda one way or the other.
Bottom line: if your vision of historical events tends to render your historical conclusions as being very simple (and coincidentally they overlap with your present-day political views), you're probably leaving a lot of important stuff out. Real history is complicated and messy.
Further reading: for timeline issues, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's Racing the Enemy is great, and even if you don't totally go along with his overall argument, it's worth the read for a balanced look at the US, Japanese, and Soviet perspectives at the end of the war.
On the Japanese pre-planning about the invasion by the USSR, the work of Yukiko Koshiro has been eye-opening for me. On the timing of the bombs and etc., see esp. @GordinMichael 's "Five Days in August."
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