<i>it was well known that the Japanese&#x27;s military capacity was reduced to virtually nothing</i><p>Not even MacArthur, the only one who still was planning on carrying out Operation Olympic as conceived, believed that.  He had ordered up 1&#x2F;4 of the Purple Hearts thought necessary (perhaps for it and Operation Coronet, the invasion of Honshu), <i>and we&#x27;re still using those</i>.<p>People who trusted our intelligence intercepts knew between the IJA reinforcements in Kyushu and the 8,000 ready kamikazes that the original concept was dead.  Based on our apocalyptic invasion experiences culminating in the Battle of Okinawa, those who didn&#x27;t know about the Manhattan Project were planning on liberal use of chemical weapons, those who did, using a handful of nukes.<p><i>My point is, victory was impossible and defeat inevitably
the USSR declaration changed very little from the Japanese perspective. But it changed a lot for the American perspective, which is why it&#x27;s plausible the US wanted to force surrender quickly.</i><p>This thesis fails because the USSR didn&#x27;t do it until after we&#x27;d bombed Hiroshima, in fact, they started on the day we bombed Nagasaki (or a hour or so before that day; I haven&#x27;t seen a timezone adjusted timeline).  By then we&#x27;d learned how totally untrustworthy Stalin was, and of course his eyes were on the prize of Eastern Europe.<p>In fact, if anything, I would expect the causality ran the other way.  Prior to the dramatic results of bombing Hiroshima, and certainly prior to Trinity 3 weeks earlier, I would expect that Stalin believed he had plenty of time to gain what he wanted in the east, but those brought the distinct possibility the war would be over immediately, as indeed happened.<p>As for the threat of a divided Japan, exactly whose navy would have deposited enough Red Army troops on the Home Islands for that to be a concern?