have allowed this to happen without direct intervention by the Emperor. Even if the United States had agreed to allow the Emperor to stay in power the Japanese would have not agreed to surrender. It was defeat, not the terms of the defeat that the Japanese military leaders so vehemently opposed. The American public wholeheartedly backed the unconditional surrender of Japan. "A Gallup Poll in June had shown that a mere fraction of Americans, only 7 percent, thought he had should be retained after the war, even as a puppet, while a full third of the people though he should be executed as a war criminal." (p.112) In respect of the American lives sacrificed, nothing but unconditional surrender would have sufficed. "Unconditional surrender was an objective too long established, too often proclaimed; it had been too great a rallying cry from the time of Pearl Harbor to abandon now, Byrnes insisted. Truman had reaffirmed it as a policy in his first speech to Congress on April 16." (p.112) In addition to these factors a negotiated peace would be tantamount to political suicide. "Politically it would be disastrous, Byres was also sure." (p.112) The very idea of negotiation with Japan seemed deplorable the vast majority of Americans. It has also been argued that a demonstration could have been held for Japanese officials on an uninhabited island. This, if it had worked, would have spared Hiroshima and Nagasaki devastation while still revealing the atom bomb's fantastic power to the Japanese. Assuming that the Japanese would have even agreed to this, there was no guarantee that the fickle atomic bomb would detonate properly. Assuming that the bomb detonated correctly it would still pose several large problems for America. First and most obvious was that one of the three bombs that were left which were difficult to produce and very expensive to procure had just been used to annihilate an area of no military ...
