I can add something relevant to this bit: One wonders, of course, why anyone would think the Japanese would think the atomic bomb was a one-off thing, or that

I can add something relevant to this bit: One wonders, of course, why anyone would think the Japanese would think the atomic bomb was a one-off thing, or that the Americans wouldn't have the resolve to use it again. When I was a student studying the Japanese side of WW2, one of my histories quoted a memo to the Japanese high command arguing that since producing nuclear weapons was such an expensive and lengthy process, it was almost certain that the USA had only two bombs and that their threat to continue with them was a bluff. It was not unreasonable for the Americans to expect the Japanese to be skeptical. Down in the comments section, the author makes this point: One of the very best points that Hasegawa makes in his work is that there is no single "Japanese" or "American" policy opinion -- because both governments involved rather complicated balances of power within their cabinets. Something usually ignored when discussing American decision making about the bomb is the actual state of their knowledge of Japanese thinking. We now have 70-odd years of studying Japanese documents and interviews with key Japanese and there is still nothing close to a consensus on how the Japanese would have reacted to different situations. Yet people criticize the American leadership for lacking that same insight into the mind of the enemy during the war.