This article sounds laughably insane to me, not a historian but hear me out anyway

Japan wanted to surrender:

> “But, in 1965, historian Gar Alperovitz argued that, although the bombs did force an immediate end to the war, Japan’s leaders had wanted to surrender anyway and likely would have done so before the American invasion planned for Nov. 1.”

Or maybe not ? Which is it ?

> “Japan’s leaders had not seriously considered surrendering prior to that day.”

Japan’s leaders were worried about the divinity of the Emperor. Insane to believe these people inhabited the 20th century at the same time the Nuclear bomb was developed:

> “What if they decided to put the emperor—who was believed to be divine—on trial? What if they got rid of the emperor and changed the form of government entirely?”

They had their own nuclear program:

> Third, the Japanese military understood, at least in a rough way, what nuclear weapons were. Japan had a nuclear weapons program.

The US (not Stalin) was having their way with Japan through the summer of 1945:

> In the summer of 1945, the U.S. Army Air Force carried out one of the most intense campaigns of city destruction in the history of the world. Sixty-eight cities in Japan were attacked and all of them were either partially or completely destroyed.

Japan’s junta didn’t care about it’s citizens:

> Japan’s leaders consistently displayed disinterest in the city bombing that was wrecking their cities.

They should have been Mussolini’d along with the Emperor

AKA the find out stage:

> The Japanese were in a relatively difficult strategic situation. They were nearing the end of a war they were losing. Conditions were bad.

No shit sherlock - they couldn’t even project power beyond their island

But, they had two plans! How had the other plans been going so far ? Doesn’t matter:

You know shot is bad when you have two plans to surrender:

> They had two plans for getting better surrender terms; they had, in other words, two strategic options. The first was diplomatic. Japan had signed a five-year neutrality pact with the Soviets in April of 1941, which would expire in 1946. A group consisting mostly of civilian leaders and led by Foreign Minister Togo Shigenori hoped that Stalin…

OME You must have been truly desperate to come to Stalin for help in 1945

> The second plan was military.. They hoped to use Imperial Army ground troops to inflict high casualties on U.S. forces when they invaded.

Hope is not a strategy

> It didn’t take a military genius to see that, while it might be possible to fight a decisive battle against one great power invading from one direction, it would not be possible to fight off two great powers attacking from two different directions.

Hmm where had we seen this before

> Japanese intelligence was predicting that U.S. forces might not invade for months.

Did they predict that they would lose their Navy and have two atomic bombs dropped on their home land ?

Anyways, we are supposed to believe that based on this timeline,

Aug 6 - Hiroshima
Aug 8 - Stalin invades China
Aug 9 - Nagasaki
Aug 11 - Hirohito surrenders

after getting blown to pieces on their own home islands, with no Navy, Stalin invading China was somehow the final straw.