Absolutely there was.
No, there wasn't. This is false history pushed by anti-American leftists.
For starters, the Japanese were far more racist than Americans. Their entire worldview was shaped by a conceptual racial hierarchy with Japanese at the top.
In the summer of 1945 mopping up operations on Okinawa and Iwo Jima were underway and, since Germany had already surrendered, the British, Dutch, French, and Americans were transferring a fearsome amount of weaponry to the Pacific.
Japan never could have defeated an undistracted Britain let alone the United States. This statement is based on economics not race. Japan's economy was about one-third the size of Britain's and less than one-tenth the size of the US. Their leaders knew this and on some level understood the hopelessness of their situation. Their people were starving and their few remaining ships and planes were stranded due to lack of fuel. They could have surrendered at any time.
Instead of surrendering the leadership of Japan was sending instructions to their ambassador in Moscow to try to get the Soviets to mediate a peace on terms that anyone could see would be unacceptable to the US and Britain who had made abundantly clear that their terms were "unconditional surrender".
In their instructions to their ambassador in Moscow they were literally trying to use territories that they no longer possessed as bargaining chips.
The US and British leadership read the messages between Tokyo and their ambassador in Moscow because both Britain and the US had broken the Japanese diplomatic codes. Thus, Washington and London knew that Japan had not yet accepted the reality of their situation.
In the midst of all this Truman and the US leadership considered three basic options (Note that I've left Atlee out because although the British Pacific Fleet (BPF) was fantastically powerful by pre-war standards, by 1945 it was miniscule compared to the forces that the US had arrayed against Japan):
- Blockade. The Japanese were effectively out of fuel and rapidly heading toward mass starvation because they couldn’t produce enough food domestically to feed their population. The US blockade by this point was very nearly impenetrable so the argument for this option was to simply let the Japanese people starve until they got hungry enough to surrender.
- Invade. With the resources freed up by the end of the war in Europe the US had more than enough men and equipment to take the Japanese home islands by force. The main argument for this option was that it was the only one that was guaranteed to end the war.
- Atomic Bombs. The US leadership did understand the fearsome power of these weapons but they probably didn't fully appreciate it. One argument against the use of the bombs was that the firebombing campaign had been so successful that there weren't many Japanese cities left worth bombing.
Truman chose to pursue all three options. The blockade was continued, preparations for an invasion scheduled for November of 1945 went on, and two bombs were dropped.
That the bombs saved American lives is obvious. Allied planners had estimated a Million casualties in the planned invasion of Japan (Operation Downfall). The interesting thing is that the bombs actually saved far more Japanese lives. Japanese casualties defending on Okinawa and Iwo Jima were many times US casualties so their losses defending Honshu would easily have reached seven digits. Approximately one-quarter of the civilian population of Okinawa were either killed or committed suicide during the Battle of Okinawa. Extrapolated out to the entire population of Japan that is around 17-18 Million people. The blockade would have caused a substantial portion of Japan's population to literally die of starvation over the winter of 1945/46.
