I've recently read Eagle Against the Sun by Ronald Spector. Good book, and I fully accept that it's not the most complete, but for a layman like myself it did quite well to explain the war. He mentions that, after the Hiroshima bombing but before the Nagasaki, there may have been a couple of Japanese officials who thought the Americans may only have had a single bomb to drop, and thus they already used their trump card (a justification to draw out a bloody fight on the main islands as I understand it).
I wasn't able to find a copy of the source for this, but I'm interested in the broader question. What did Japan know about the Atomic bomb after it had been dropped? Did they really think there may have only been one? Did they properly comprehend the devastation, or did some officials think that, though a major bomb, it was something they could fight through?
Thanks!
Hi — I answered a similar question awhile back. The short answer is, they were still processing exactly what it was when the second one occurred. There is very little evidence of how the bomb affected their strategic thinking from the time, because it is mixed up with a lot of other simultaneous issues. There were certainly individual Japanese officials who held various opinions on the matter, but that is less important than the times at which they came together to try and decide policy. It's a lot more complex than the "the Japanese thought it was a single bomb, then we bombed them again, then they surrendered" story that Americans like to tell (as a retroactive justification for the use of the second bomb).