Replying to a message of Earl Croasmun to Bob Ackley:

 EC> ~>  BA>> I don't do Internet and in any case I don't
dispute that the
 EC> Japanese ~>  BA>> offered unconditional surrender after the Nagasaki
 EC> blast.  What I ~>  BA>> said was that the Japanese wanted to open
 EC> surrender negotiations a ~>  BA>> couple of months *before* the
 EC> Hiroshima bomb was dropped, and that ~>  BA>> Stalin chose not to
 EC> pass the message along to his allies.

 EC> ~>  MG> I'm highly suspect of whatever resource you got that factoid
 EC> from.

 EC> ~> That *fact* came from David Kahn's book 'The Codebreakers,'
 EC> published in ~> 1966 with a second edition published in the 1990s.  I
 EC> have both editions. ~> Mr. Kahn is an acknowledged authority on code
 EC> breaking - the book goes back ~> centuries and works right up to the
 EC> 1960s - and on US efforts in that regard.

 EC> I didn't think there was much controversy that Japan was at that point
 EC> ready to NEGOTIATE a possible surrender.  But it wasn't ready to
 EC> unconditionally surrender, and Truman would accept nothing less.

That was in fact the sticking point as I noted in another message.  The US
*was* reading that Japaneser diplomatic traffic in real time.  I think there
was insufficient time between the Allies' decision to slightly modify the
'unconditional surrender' demand (to 'unconditional surrender' of Japan's
military) for the Japanese government to respond.  The main problem seems
to have been that the Allies did not guarantee that the Japanese emperor
would be left in power.

In any case Japan was incapable of doing *anything* at that point.  She was
an island nation with no remaining commerce, her vaunted 'Kwantung Army'
had been stripped and the troops sent to defend islands that the US bypassed
(and many of them were drowned when the ships carrying them were sunk).
Two thirds of Japan's shipping capacity had been sunk (along with most of her
navy) and the rest of it was hiding in ports still controlled by Japan.  Very little
was getting through the US blockade of the islands and certainly not enough to
maintain either Japan's population or its remaining military.  Japan's navy was
reduced to one old, damaged battleship, a few destroyers and a couple of dozen
(very good) submarines in the home waters and a small fleet of cruisers and 
destroyers at Singapore.  All but a very few of Japan's experienced pilots had been
killed.  While Japan does have a native supply of coal it does not have a native
supply of oil.  The US could have sat back and literally starved Japan into
submission,
but that would have taken at least a year.

--- FleetStreet 1.19+