Upon defeating Japan, Stalin said: “For forty years we, people of the older generation, waited for this day” — reclaiming the whole of Sakhalin, Kamchatka, and the Kurils. There was no way the USSR would aide with Japan. Truman had a horrible choice on his watch. What-if is easyhttps://twitter.com/wellerstein/status/1027574332044783616 …
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And (as I pointed out in thread) there were plenty in US high command, including experts on Japan, who thought that if this condition would make it easier for Japanese to surrender, it should be explicitly given.
(And they knew about splits in Japanese high command through intercepted and decrypted Japanese diplomatic cables.) I'm not saying they ought to have done one thing or another — just that these were the options on the table, as seen at the time.
