This is an important and original book. The author, equally expert in interpreting American and Japanese archival sources, emphasizes the parallel interests and outlooks between the two nations even while their armed forces were slaughtering each other. He sees the postwar rapprochement foreshadowed in the thinking of both Japanese and American officials as early as 1943. He argues that the Japanese government could and should have accepted the Potsdam Declaration of July 1945, thus ending the war by the beginning of August before the atomic bomb was dropped.