I've lived in Japan for over 30-years, read quite a bit about the events and internal debates that lead up to the decision to surrender, and been a part of more

I've lived in Japan for over 30-years, read quite a bit about the events and internal debates that lead up to the decision to surrender, and been a part of more conversations on the subject than I can remember. The facts in the article are not wrong (the rarely are), but the problem is the reductionist approach to answering the question of "what really ended the war?" You can make a strong, evidence-backed case that the atomic bombs did, and you can make an equally strong case that they did not. There is no one thing that ended the war. It's certainly interesting to consider how things might have played out under various counterfactuals, but as much as we would all find a simple, tidy answer far more satisfying, the reasons the war ended are just as complex and nuanced as the reasons the war started.