Comment by throw0101d

> Dropping nukes was both barbaric and the more civilized option.

Also perhaps worth noting that after the first bomb the Japanese government was not planning to surrender. The second dropping moved things to a deadlock where half of the ministers—both in the small war council, and the larger full government—wanted to the surrender and the other half did not.

The Emperor had to be called in—an almost unprecedented action—to break the tie. Then, even after the Emperor had made his decision, there was a coup attempt to prevent the "surrender"† broadcast:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyūjō_incident

I do not know how anyone can think that Japan would have stopped fighting without the bombings when two bombings barely got things over the line.

The book 140 days to Hiroshima by David Dean Barrett goes over the meeting minutes / deliberations and interviews to outline the timeline, and it was not a sure thing that the surrender was going to happen: the hardliners really wanted to keep fighting, and they were ready to go to great lengths to get their way (see Kyūjō above).

The Japanese knew for a year before the bombings that they could not win the war, but they figured that by holding out—causing more causalities of Japanese, Americans, Chinese, Filipinos, etc—the US would lose their resolve and terms could be negotiated so that Japan could (e.g.) keep the land they conquered in Manchuria, etc.

† A word not actually used by the Japanese in the broadcast.