Would this by chance be a reference to Kōichi Kido's personal diary where he asserts the emperor wanted to prevent further "scarifice of his children"??
Tsuyoshi Hasegawa and others (Wilson et.) have argued Kido was trying to paint the Emperor in a benevolent light there not reflected in the emperor's July 30 reaction to the Potsdam Proclamation.
If nuclear bombs were what did it why did the military insist on still following through with Ketsu Gō even after Nagasaki was bombed and the Emperor would have surrendered without them? Rear Admiral Sōkichi Takagi was already looking to negotiated surrender in Feb '44. The Supreme War Council was reaching out about Soviet-mediated surrender in May.
Kawabe Torashiro, Deputy Chief of Staff, called the atomic bombings "terrible", but described The Soviets entering the war as "...a very difficult situation."
Hirohito himself in an address to the army and navy said
Now that the Soviet Union has entered the war against us, to continue … under the present conditions at home and abroad would only recklessly incur even more damage to ourselves and result in endangering the very foundation of the empire’s existence. Therefore, even though enormous fighting spirit still exists in the imperial navy and army, I am going to make peace with the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union, as well as with Chungking, in order to maintain our glorious kokutai.
Emphasis mine.
I really don't buy one bit that the destruction of 160,800 tons constant conventional firebombing didn't have the supposed war-ending effect these two other bombs the dropping of which did not even result in a convening of The Supreme War Council allegedly did.
Even The United States Strategic Bombing Surveys under direction of the U.S. Secretary of War determined Japan would have surrendered by November '45 even without the atomic bomb or The Soviets closing off mediation. Just with air superiority and cutting off matériel.
Japan suing for peace, the war being ending anyway, combined with the horrific effects of nuclear bombs on human bodies—civilian bodies—has be consider the dropping of the bombs "highly fucked up", yes.
They melted children's bone marrow and caused them to die slowly of Atomic AIDS. It burned the pattern printed on swaddling cloth into infant's skin.
It wasn't cool when Kaiser Wilhelm "put men, women and children and old men to fire and sword", and it wasn't cool when Truman did it.
It was a warcrime, and an unnecessary and monstrous act
bananaghost