Found in 2 comments on Hacker News
mindviews · 2016-09-24
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>And of course, the bottom line is that these bombings worked. All else is speculation.
The imminent USSR invasion from the north played a significant part in the calculus of Japan's surrender. Too often the use of nuclear weapons alone gets credit, but there was a more complex political/diplomatic context surrounding _why_ they worked in the case.
Links for anyone interested in reading more on the topic: https://www.amazon.com/Racing-Enemy-Stalin-Truman-Surrender/... http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/08... http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japa...
That was probably one reason, but by no means the only one, nor even IMO a very significant one (and the article you link to, which is a good one from a good historian whose entire nuclear secrecy blog is worth reading, does not make the claim you are making--it gives a number of justifications that were made at the time, and the one you give is not one of them).
The Gar Alperovitz book referenced in the article is also worth reading, as is another historical study, Racing the Enemy [1] by Hasegawa. The latter book is not solely about the decision to use the bomb, but more generally about the process by which the war with Japan ended, but that decision and the process that produced it of course play a large role.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Racing-Enemy-Stalin-Truman-Surrender/...
> it wasn't even certain at the time that this would work as a bomb
AFAIK there was no doubt that the implosion method used in the Nagasaki bomb would work after the Trinity test. And there was never any doubt that the gun-type method used in the Hiroshima bomb would work--they didn't even bother to test it before the Hiroshima bombing. The only question was what the practical yield would be under bombing conditions. But that could have been assessed by bombing tests on uninhabited locations, as was done after the war.
> it was never as clear cut and about swift endings and saving casualities as came to be believed.
People forget that atomic bomb or not the US was already committed to levelling all cities within Japan.
These things are quite true. They do not, however, mean that wanting to field test two different bomb designs was a significant factor. Based on my reading I don't actually think it was one at the political level (what the military people thought was another matter, but the key decisions were made at the political level). Politically, I think the biggest factors involved were uncertainty about what it would actually take to get Japan to surrender, and the desire (at least once Truman came into office) to keep the Soviet Union from playing any part in postwar Japan, and more generally to deter them from expanding further.