What could the U.S. have done besides dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Alot of people with a typical one sided understanding of the war. The Japaneses were going to surrender soon. Some sources say as soon as two weeks even without the atom bombs. The B-29 raids were doing far more damage to Japan than the atom bombs. The idea was to scare them into quicker surrender because the Russians were going to invade Manchuria. BY this point we knew that any territory Stalin captured he was not going to give up. He was very excited to get his hands on Manchuria.