For decades, there has been an argument in the United States every August 6 and 9, the anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One side says the Japanese militarists were brutal and determined to fight to the end; there is substantial evidence for this. The United States captured Saipan and Tinian in the summer of 1944, about a year before Japan surrendered. The critical importance of this event, sometimes called the Pacific D-Day, is evidenced by the fact that Prime Minister (and General) Hideki Tojo, who led Japan to war with the United States after he was appointed to that office in late 1941, resigned right after the American victory in Saipan. The strategic reality was that Japan was now within range of U.S. B-29 bombers. The war could only conclude with a U.S. victory on U.S. terms. (Tinian was the base from which the B-29 bombers that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki took off.) That a U.S. victory was inevitable was devastatingly demonstrated, months before Hiroshima, by the fire bombing of Tokyo on March 10, 1945 with hundreds of B-29 bombers participating in the air raid. Yet Japan did not surrender in late 1944 or in March 1945. Even after the atomic bombings, there remained Japanese military leaders who wanted to fight on. Each August 6 we also hear that the bombings ended the war, thereby saving half a million (or more) American lives thereby obviating the need for an invasion of the Japanese homeland, which would be fiercely defended. The other “revisionist” side says that atomic bombings were were unjustified because the war was essentially over. By mid-July 1945, the United States had cable traffic in hand indicating a strong Japanese faction in favor of surrender if their emperor was allowed to remain on the throne (the very one who had given the go-ahead for the war, but who, in the end was allowed to remain, but only after the bombs had been used). U.S. generals’ upper estimate of U.S. military deaths in an invasion of...