"...the discomfort of killing hundreds of thousands of civilians in bombing raids and dropping nuclear bombs on two cities..." That decision had been made long

"...the discomfort of killing hundreds of thousands of civilians in bombing raids and dropping nuclear bombs on two cities..." That decision had been made long before 1945. A pocket timeline of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937 (officially) - 1945) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Sino-Japanese_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Sino-Japanese_War) 1931 Japanese military manufacture a casus belli (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukden_Incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukden_Incident) and invade Manchuria, defeating the Chinese and occupying it. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_invasion_of_Manchuria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_invasion_of_Manchuria) 1937 Yet another incident reignites the war, leading to the capture of Shanghai (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Shanghai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Shanghai), the capture of Beijing, and the capture of Nanjing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre): ("Because of the myriad of factors, death toll estimates vary from 40,000 to over 300,000, with rape cases ranging from 20,000 to over 80,000 cases. However, the most sophisticated and credible scholars in Japan, which include a large number of authoritative academics, support the validity of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and its findings, which estimate at least 200,000 casualties and at least 20,000 cases of rape."). Some additional info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contest_to_kill_100_people_using_a_sword https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contest_to_kill_100_people_usi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre#Rape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre#Rape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre#Nanking_Safety_Zone_and_the_role_of_foreigners https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre#Nanking_Safet... (I mention those because they make it perfectly clear that the Japanese people knew about the activities of the military in China.) These activities resulted in an international response (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Shanghai#International_response https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Shanghai#Internation...), but nothing resulted until after the Japanese takeover of what was then French Indochina. Then, trade restrictions and an embargo resulted in Japan's attack on the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Events_leading_to_the_attack_on_Pearl_Harbor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Events_leading_to_the_attack_o...). "Some historical estimates of the number of deaths which resulted from Japanese war crimes range from 3 to 14 million through massacre, human experimentation, starvation, and forced labor that was either directly perpetrated or condoned by the Japanese military and government." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes) Now, I realize you've said you acknowledge Japan's war crimes, and you might even invoke the sunk cost fallacy: those people were already dead. However, there are two points you seem to be missing: the goal of the allies with their "unconditional surrender" terms were the removal of governments that had repeatedly demonstrated that they were militarily aggressive and their replacement with governments that were not (successfully, I might add), and by the scale of Japan's own actions in the war that "discomfort" is a drop in the bucket.