"Thomas’s insistence that the bomb was necessary to bring about Japan’s surrender is largely contradicted by his own evidence. In the most interesting and vivid part of his book, he takes us into the hot, humid, mosquito-ridden bunkers at the heart of the devastated Japanese capital, suffused with the ashes of a hundred thousand inhabitants incinerated in LeMay’s fire raids, where a sweating, tiny ruling circle, the so-called Big Six, argued and intrigued. They all knew Japan had lost the war."

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n22/andrew-cockburn/big-six-v.-little-boy