no simple highway

A link from cos: Why did Japan surrender?. It's a review of research by historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, claiming that the primary factor in the Japanese surrender that ended World War II was the Soviet entry into the war against Japan, and not the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as is commonly believed.

I did a term paper in college on the necessity of the atomic bombing (coming down pretty firmly in the revisionist camp that claims it was unnecessary), so this is familiar ground despite my having not looked at it in two decades. One thing that the article doesn't cover, and nor does an article of Hasegawa's that I looked up, is the effect of the bomb on the Soviet decision to enter the war against Japan. They were definitely planning to do so, if for no better reason than to have a share in the spoils of Japan's inevitable defeat, and indeed the conclusion I drew was that this was at least as major a factor in the decision to drop the bomb as was the desire to avoid an invasion of the home islands. I also concluded that the bombings prompted Stalin to declare war and invade Manchuria as rapidly as possible, so as to get at least a place at the table, and that the Nagasaki bombing was at least in part prompted by the Soviet declaration, to help effect a surrender as rapidly as possible before the Soviets got too far. So you have a complicated interplay here in the motivations and actions of three governments. Hasegawa reads Russian fluently as well as Japanese and English, so I'm sure he's studied this in far more detail.

Now, this was a college term paper built entirely on secondary sources, nothing to be confused with actual historical scholarship, and I freely admit that I came into it with some degree of bias. Though maybe I should have been biased in the other direction, as my father would have been in the front lines of the invasion of the Japanese home islands. His viewpoint on this is much less equivocal than mine. :-)