Japan tried to get peace negotiations months before Hiroshima.

They just tried it via the Soviets because USSR and Japan had an agreement not to attack each other. And Japan wanted no unconditional surrender. So there's that.

The USSR declared war on Japan right around the time of the bombings and attacked Japans chinese puppet state Manchukuo.

At this point Japan would have surrendered in any way.

The US wanted to keep the soviets out of the surrender, they wanted to demonstrate their new power...

Ever wondered how it actually came to the Korean War?

Wikipedia:

Different administrations had an impact on how far would USA go, I agree, but the very same Truman authorized the overthrown of the democratic government of Guatemala in 1952. The reason to do it? This way an american company would make more money. It ended being cancelled, not because of morals, but because it become public.

There's no need to argue abut the outcoming scenario as Eisenhower continued where Truman stopped: 36 years of civil war, over 200000 dead civilians, genocide against mayan population, all kinds human right violations.

So I don't buy the idea of Truman doing things to save lives in the middle of a war.

How about this: Since Truman and through the rest of the 20th century USA did what its government perceived as better for the USA regardless of how questionable such acts were, with a few exceptions. It explains lots of things.

Since one specific session of Superme War Council on August 9th that initiated the process that ended up with Japan's surrender eventually was convended few minutes before Nagasaki explosion, it doubt the latter was the direct reasoning behind the urgency of said session. Hiroshima bombing that happened full three days before apparently wasn't worthy of any immediate action as well. The culprit is not really hard to indentify, few hours before Nagasaki was shelled into oblivion, before sunrise Red Army has started an offensive operation in Manchuria, therefore ruining any hopes for anything but uncomitted surrender for Japan.

BTW I posted a link few posts above to recently declassified document on the situation a month later after bombings, it's pretty interesting. Author's emphasis is that radiophobia, a hysteria behind bombings and their effects, is an afterthought that to a great degree was stirred up by the media and used as an excuse for surrender.

Considering how brutal and deadly the land war against Japanese soldiers had been prior to the atomic bombings I'd argue it seems believable. Japanese soldiers suffered worse casualties than Allied forces when battling on land and civilians didn't fare well either. An invasion of Japan would have likely been worse.

I'm sorry, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

What he's trying to say is described in this excellent article, very good read.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/08/07/why_did_japan_surrender/

Excellent article and one I agree with for the most part. Tell me, what in your opinion is the most important point one should come away with reading the article?

What struck me most is that the bomb wasn't regarded as a critical event when it dropped. It was just another way to level an (unimportant) city, like the 60+ before that were (fire) bombed to rubble. (Incidentally Grave of the fire flies is based on these raids)

The bomb - horrific as it was - was not as special as Americans have always imagined. In early March, several hundred B-29 Super Fortress bombers dropped incendiary bombs on downtown Tokyo. Some argue that more died in the resulting firestorm than at Hiroshima.

In fact, more than 60 of Japan’s cities had been substantially destroyed by the time of the Hiroshima attack. In the three weeks before Hiroshima 25 cities were heavily bombed.

To us, then, Hiroshima was unique, and the move to atomic weaponry was a great leap, military and moral. But Hasegawa argues the change was incremental. “Once we had accepted strategic bombing as an acceptable weapon of war, the atomic bomb was a very small step,” he says. To Japan’s leaders, Hiroshima was yet another population center leveled, albeit in a novel way. If they didn’t surrender after Tokyo, they weren’t going to after Hiroshima.

Besides that I doubt the Japanese fully realized the extent of the damage in the days before the surrender. Communication must have been sketchy, eye witness reports unreliable and many people didn't die straight away while help didn't arrive until much later. If you have the stomach for it, watch Barefoot Gen, an autobiographical story from a survivor. A boy survives the blast and finds himself wandering in the land of the walking dead, literally.

The view that the bomb wasn't particularly shocking at the time is repeated in other texts which I quoted before
The fact is that as far as the Japanese militarists were concerned, the atomic bomb was just another weapon. The two atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were icing on the cake, and did not do as much damage as the firebombings of Japanese cities. The B-29 firebombing campaign had brought the destruction of 3,100,000 homes, leaving 15 million people homeless, and killing about a million of them. It was the ruthless firebombing, and Hirohito's realization that if necessary the Allies would completely destroy Japan and kill every Japanese to achieve "unconditional surrender" that persuaded him to the decision to end the war. The atomic bomb is indeed a fearsome weapon, but it was not the cause of Japan's surrender, even though the myth persists even to this day.
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_Weber.html

Interesting that the firebombing was deadlier and yet it's the atomic bombings that get more attention.

Because we now know that nuclear bombing will have consequences for the next thousands of years.

Two things:
Many people died weeks and months later, even years later because of radiation sickness, long term effects...

Those where actually just two bombs, no massive bombing with hundreds of bombers and 200-1000 and more tons of bombs.

That is what basically was done in Germany as well as Japan. Really massive air raids, normally multiple air raids. And keep in mind that Japan and Germany had been bombing cities as well. So those massive air raids where probably much more normal.