Today...

[Amadeus]

The bombs hastened what had become a foregone conclusion by weeks, maybe months, and saved more lives then they took. Without those strikes the Pacific campaign would have continued, the Japanese were prepped for a land war on Japan even after the Russians rushed through China. Those preparation did not unravel until AFTER Hiroshima and Nagasaki specifically, not just the general time frame.

Your argument assumes that Japanese leadership was not aware of that foregone conclusion. But they were. They rallied the populace in national defense, but that was all a propaganda stunt. Most of the leadership knew well that their chances of repelling an invasion were slim. That is why they seeked to gain a peace in which the Emperor`s preservation was guaruanteed.
The irony is that the American occupation forces did preserve the Emperor, who remained at his position until his death in 1989.

So let us recheck the facts. The Japanese were willing to surrender if the Emperor was preserved. The US was well aware of that, thanks to their possession of Japanese naval codes. The US preserved the Emperor after the war anyway. When one considers all that, you realise that the war could have been ended well before September. The US goverment had both the means and the conditions to reach a peace settlement without having to resort to nuclear weapons or even invasion and they knew it.

So in the end of all things, the nuclear bombings only ended up taking lives and not saving them. Those lives and many others (including those of people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki) could have been saved before the nuclear bomb was ready for use.

Also, as far as I know, the armed civil defense was disbanded by the occupation forces and not the Japanese goverment.

The reason I doubt the Russian victory in Manchuria as being the true crux if victory is because it was that very action that left the U.S. to drop to bombs to PREVENT them from getting a foothold in Japan. We wanted their help, we didn't want them to run the show. The timeline of events supports the Atom Bomb as being the rational and the other factors to merely be contributing.

The problem with that reasoning is that both hit targets were located in southern parts of Japan. Hiroshima is located in the most southern part of the largest main Japanese island Honshu whereas Nagasaki is located on Kyushu, the most southern of the main Japanese islands. If the intention of the atomic bombings was to prevent the Soviets from getting a foothold in Japan, a more logical choice of targets would have been in the northern part of Honshu and Hokkaido (which the Soviets did indeed have plans to invade).