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By Root 1171 0

Just before 10.00, the Emperor called in Kido. Because of the Soviet attack in Manchuria, the Emperor said, ‘it is necessary to study and decide on the termination of the war’, and he directed Kido to sound out Suzuki on the matter. Kido told Suzuki, who turned up at the Imperial Palace ten minutes later, that the Emperor wished to end the war ‘by immediately taking advantage of the Potsdam Declaration’, though whether Kido had actually heard the Emperor put it this way remains unclear. Suzuki summoned the Big Six, and within twenty minutes the group had been collected and the meeting begun in a room in the palace basement.

Maneuver and intrigue followed; the details of these are best chronicled elsewhere. Suzuki began by arguing for the acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration, for the combination of the atomic bomb and the Soviet invasion made it impossible to win. He and Togo understood that accepting the Declaration meant that the kokutai must be preserved—that is, the Emperor would not be punished nor deprived of the privileges and symbols of his office. Yonai, whom Togo had thought had agreed with this position that morning, now suggested that three additional conditions might (not should) be attached to Japan’s acceptance, and Umezu and Anami elaborated: the Japanese military should have responsibility for disarmament, there must be no occupation, and the Japanese government should decide who should be designated as war criminals. All four conditions, the two army representatives insisted, must be met by the Americans before Japan would agree to surrender. Thereafter, multiple lines were drawn. Togo advocated surrender with just the first condition, Suzuki and Yonai (according to Tsuyoshi Hasegawa) ‘were leaning toward Togo’s position’ but did not speak against demanding the other three conditions, and Toyoda thought two conditions might be met but doubted that four would be.44

Then, an hour into the debate, came the second added shock: the Big Six learned that an atomic bomb had struck Nagasaki.

LeMay had resumed the firebombing after Hiroshima, sending 152 B-29s on the 7th and 373 more on the 8th over Japanese cities, including the industrial hub of Yawata. The second atomic bomb, an implosion device with a plutonium core like the one tested at Trinity, was meanwhile under assembly on Tinian. It was designated for Kokura, a medium-sized city (about 195,000) in northern Kyushu with a substantial arsenal. The attack was scheduled for 11 August. Predictions of stormy weather for the 10th and after persuaded Tibbets to move the mission forward to the 9th. The bomb would be carried by Major Charles W. Sweeney in a B-29 dubbed Bock’s Car. Fat Man weighed 1,000 pounds more than Little Boy;

Sweeney thought it ‘resembled a grossly oversized decorative squash’. Like its predecessor, Fat Man bore messages for the Japanese. The engineer Harlow Russ scrawled verse inside the bomb’s tail cone:

Sappy Jappy started scrappy,

Bombed Pearl Harbor,

Pretty crappy.

Jappy have reached end of scrappy,

Bomb will knock Japan slappy happy.

Sweeney sought an audience with the Catholic priest assigned to Tinian. The two men discussed sin, Christian ethics, and Thomas Aquinas’s conditions for a just war.45

Things went wrong. Bock’s Car’s backup fuel pump failed, leaving inaccessible 600 gallons of precious fuel. Two hours into the flight the red warning light on Fat Man’s fuse monitor started flashing, which seemed to indicate that some of the bomb’s fuses had been activated, threatening detonation. A weaponeer discovered that ground technicians had misaligned two switches and caused the monitor’s circuits to malfunction; he solved the problem. The pilot of the photography plane, James Hopkins, missed the rendezvous point over Yakoshima, forcing Sweeney, already burning limited fuel, to go on without him. The weather over Kokura was supposed to have been clear, but by the time Bock's Car reached the city the wind had shifted and the area was obscured by smoke from burning Yawata, victim of LeMay’s incendiaries the previous