Japan and WW2

Reading Richard Frank’s Downfall about the (agonizingly slow until it came fast) surrender of Japan in WW2.  I've always wondered the moral decision making around its development and use, and why Japan didn't surrender after the first one.

The rationale for use was predicated on the steady evolution of increased tolerance of civilian deaths, beginning with German (who else?) pilots in WW I. It feels in some sense inevitable in one sense, like the frog sitting in water that gets hotter degree by degree. It’s reaction-reaction-reaction all the time: a reaction to German and Axis use of civilian terror and deaths by beginning Allied bombing campaigns. The panicked reaction to news Germany was bent on going nuclear led to our Manhattan Project (the Germans badly misjudged the amount of material they would need and pretty much gave up). And the deployment of the bombs was perhaps a reaction to news of vast Japanese homeland mobilization as well as the prospect that the Russians, an already untrustworthy “ally”, were planning to take part in the spoils of Japan.

Why two bombs? The short answer seems to be that members in Japan’s inner circle already knew enough about nuclear programs to think that the U.S. had at most a very limited supply of weapons, perhaps only one. They knew enough, alas, to know the difficulties, a poisonous knowledge that helped trigger the Nagasaki bombing since the first one didn't tip the balance. Perhaps even the second wasn’t enough on its own either, given they suddenly had Russia declaring war on them at the same time. So the second weapon was deployed with speed -- not to prevent the Japanese from having enough time to come to their senses but because without a quick second bomb it would look like we had a very limited supply.

In some ways it all feels foreordained if grotesquely tragic. You can see the slow build-up: the steady incremental steps to evil in the form of civilian bombings (the American ones at Tokyo not only killed civilians but ended the Japanese nuclear program). There was the box that Germany put America in as far as having to design and build it. The box that Japan and Russia put us in as far as deployment. 

The world wars of the last century feel surreal given the relative "peace" we have had since.