Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "Military History Visualized" channel.

@Tavenhotep There was no "von" in Balck's name. It would be like saying Winston d'Churchill.
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From looking at that paper it appears that the surveys in question were just trying to determine if the explosion was from an atomic weapon at all, not what sort of weapon it was. They didn't even make the final determination that the bomb was atomic until August 10. The other objective was determining the effects on human health of the particular kinds of radiation/fallout found at Hiroshima. And there was zero knowledge about the manufacture of plutonium in Japan in 1945. They certainly wouldn't have had the slightest idea about the capacity of the Hanford reactor or the uranium purification plant at Oak Ridge. Theoretical knowledge would be useless there, it was a question of the size of the facilities. Incidentally, plutonium wasn't first synthesized and discovered in a reactor, it was synthesized in a cyclotron (a type of early particle accelerator), but the amounts produced by cyclotron were far too small to produce a critical mass that could be used in a weapon. The whole reason the gun design was discarded for use with plutonium was that the reactor-produced plutonium contained unexpected impurities that were not present in the cyclotron-produced samples and those impurities would cause pre-detonation (a "fizzle") if used in the gun design. Again, since this was the only plutonium producing reactor on the planet it's extremely unlikely that anyone without access to the Manhattan Project (i.e., the US, UK, and Stalin's spies) had any idea about this as it had not been predicted by theory, it was only discovered once the reactor was up and running and the plutonium it produced could be analyzed. It's not even clear that during the war the Japanese knew of the existence of the reactor at Hanford that was producing plutonium as their own atomic program was focused on uranium. There's also zero indication in that paper that the survey team was aware of any difference between the bombs used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki until after the war.
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Excluding noncombat losses misses an important point, though. If a Tiger had to be abandoned and destroyed because there wasn't another vehicle around that could tow it while a medium tank in the same place could have been recovered, that speaks to the combat effectiveness of the Tiger. You can't have an effective combat tank if its flaws (including being too heavy for transport or towing) prevent it from being used in combat.
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Stalin was a pragmatist, and while he was willing to sacrifice millions of lives to keep his regime from being overrun by the Nazis, his willingness to add to an already horrific death toll just to expand his influence on the far periphery of his empire was doubtless much more limited. Also, the Soviets had no ability to conduct an amphibious invasion of Japan. However, I think you're correct about the Japanese government's well-grounded fear of the political consequences of wider Soviet involvement in the war and in the postwar occupation.
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Stalin had no ability to invade, the Soviet fleet was tiny. They did hope that if they went ahead and surrendered the US would not allow the Soviets to take part in the postwar occupation, and that hope turned out to be correct.
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Without the blockade restricting Germany's access to resources and the Allied air attacks keeping up to 2/3 of Germany's fighters and AAA in the west it would have been a completely different war and the Soviets wouldn't have had a chance.
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As has been noted many times, Soviet naval strength in the Pacific was effectively zero, and without naval support an invasion of Japan was completely out of the question. They did overrun much of Japan's conquests on the Asian mainland, which destroyed any Japanese hope of retaining those conquests in a compromise peace, and they raised the scary prospect of the Soviets being allowed to take part in a postwar division of Japan as had happened with Germany.
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The dispute isn't over whether it happened, it's about the extent to which it influenced the Japanese government's decision to surrender. I think the most accurate thing to say about it was that it didn't actually alter the military situation that much - it didn't make defending the Japanese home islands against invasion, bombing, and blockade any easier or harder - but it forced the Japanese leaders to give up unrealistic hopes they'd been clinging to about the USSR mediating a compromise peace with Japan holding on to some of its conquests.
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