Wartime records and memoirs show that the emperor and some of his aides wanted to end the war by summer 1945. But they were vacillating and couldn't prevail over a military that was determined to keep going even if that meant, as a navy official urged at one meeting, "sacrificing 20 million Japanese lives."

The atomic bombings broke this political stalemate and were thus described by Mitsumasa Yonai, the navy minister at the time, as a "gift from heaven."

Without the atomic bombings, Japan would have continued fighting by inertia. This would have meant more firebombing of Japanese cities and a ground invasion, planned for November 1945, of the main Japanese islands. The fighting over the small, sparsely populated islands of Okinawa had killed 14,000 Americans and 200,000 Japanese, and in the main islands the toll would have run into the millions.

"The atomic bomb was a golden opportunity given by heaven for Japan to end the war," Hisatsune Sakomizu, the chief cabinet secretary in 1945, said later.

Some argue that the U.S. could have demonstrated the bomb on an uninhabited island, or could have encouraged surrender by promising that Japan could keep its emperor. Yes, perhaps, and we should have tried. We could also have waited longer before dropping the second bomb, on Nagasaki.

But, sadly, the record suggests that restraint would not have worked. The Japanese military ferociously resisted surrender even after two atomic bombings on major cities, even after Soviet entry into the war, even when it expected another atomic bomb — on Tokyo.

One of the great tales of World War II concerns an American fighter pilot named Marcus McDilda who was shot down on Aug. 8 and brutally interrogated about the atomic bombs. He knew nothing, but under torture he "confessed" that the U.S. had 100 more nuclear weapons and planned to destroy Tokyo "in the next few days." The war minister informed the cabinet of this grim news — but still adamantly opposed surrender. In the aftermath of the atomic bombing, the emperor and peace faction finally insisted on surrender and were able to prevail.

"While American scholarship has undercut the U.S. moral position, Japanese historical research has bolstered it."

American scholars: The use of atomic bombs by the U.S. on Japan was a wholly unnecessary thing.

Japanese scholars: No, we wouldnt have surrendered otherwise.

American scholars: Yes you would have. All we had to do was drop Fat Man on a small Pacific island to show you we had it.

Japanese scholars: No, really the military wasnt going to stop fighting.

American scholars: Well if wed allowed surrender with the provision that Japan could keep the Emperor.

Japanese scholars: Look even after you guys dropped both bombs the military didnt want to surrender. It took us beating a downed pilot into saying you had hundreds more Atomic bombs and Tokyo was next for them to even start to budge.

American scholars: Well we were still wrong.

Scholarship is one thing but politics another. No positive adjective should ever be attached to the use of the bomb. The question is why or why not. Good strategy or bad? The revisionists will always have the advantage of the fact that no one in their right mind would allow themselves to praise an atomic bombing. It automatically results in disqualification from the debate. YOu think WHAT?! On the other hand, the revisionists have the disadvantage of the fact that the bombings ended a war in which the suffering of the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was just a drop in the bucket and the fact that things have turned out pretty well for both countries since then.