Alex WellersteinVerified account

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."

Am curious, although not being well read on the matter (given that historians believe that the A-bomb did not factor strongly in the Japanese surrender) whether there was an element of theatre involved in the use of these weapons to disuade soviet invasion?

I suppose I think two things about this. The first is that what you wrote puts it a bit too strongly in my judgment. It is not that historians think that it did not factor, even sometimes strongly.... 1/

But that it was not the *only* thing that mattered. It was not even something that you could separate out from the blockade, the "conventional" firebombing, backchannel negotiations, and Soviet entry into the war. It's just impossible to separate all the streams. 2/

The second point is about dissuading Soviet invasion. There was no way anyone was going to dissuade that, atomic bomb or no. The Soviets pulled out of the neutrality treaty with Japan in May; they promised they would join the conflict in 3 months (= August). 3/