Hasegawa, whose specialty is Russian history, said histories for the last half-century have treated the Soviet entry into the war against Japan on Aug. 8 as a sideshow. U.S. textbooks today emphasize the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6 and the bombing of Nagasaki on Aug. 9 as the decisive action forcing the Japanese to surrender by Aug. 14.

But Hasegawa said the bombing of Hiroshima didn't deliver a knockout punch, and the bombing of Nagasaki got surprisingly little notice at the highest levels of the Japanese government, which already was trying to find a way to end the war.

"Of course it had an impact, but it was not that decisive," said Hasegawa, who studied imperial Japanese war records in Tokyo as well as Soviet archives. "What it did was to inject urgency into Japanese diplomatic efforts to end the war."

Very interesting article on the end of World War II, which suggests that Russia, threatening to invade Japan, is really what ended the war. Perhaps that's true, I'm not a historian, but my guess would be the bombs helped them decide that surrendering to the U.S. would mean protection from the Russians. Still, Russia was extremely powerful and controlled a lot of the board in Risk, er, I mean Europe. It will be interesting to see how these new documents reveal what really happened in the last days of World War II, especially the parts where it could have ended a full month earlier if not for the Emperor in Japan trying to remain in power!
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