If war broke out tomorrow....

[A Black Falcon]

GR we had four A-Bombs. I believe we had one more left... not absolutely certain, but I think we had one more left.

And you're right that living it doesn't give you as many options as speculating for a long time. And you need to take into account that they didn't really know what was going on in Japan exactly... or they probably would have tried more diplomacy a bit sooner and maybe done a assurance for the Emperor (though that was contentious because some said that that would leave the militarist structure in place -- we rectified that by making the Emperor powerless in the constitution we wrote...)... but they had a lot of other things and probably didn't see Japan nearly as close to surrender as information suggests it possibly was.

Oh, if the militarists had kept power and we had invaded it would absolutely have been a bloodbath. As I said the people may have had misgivings but if they had been asked to fight and die, or commit suicide by the millions, they would have done it... which is why I said that invasion was no alternative. The question was how we could get a stubborn nation to surrender without invasion... and Truman took the safest way out, the way most certain to lead to a quick surrender. Other means probably would have worked but it would have meant working with the Japanese leaders in some fashion, and given we were in a war with them it's very possible that we didn't make enough efforts that way...

And then of course we ran out of time, and the Soviets entered the war. We couldn't let them take any more land so we had to end it really fast and we just used the bomb.