End the war quickly with mass death and destruction instead of allowing for months and months of protracted negotiations?

“Jaw, jaw is better than war, war.” — Winston Churchill.

Japan no longer presented a threat to America, so “protracted negotiations” were not something to be compared to, say, Chamberlain’s “appeasement”. A great many lives could have been saved if only we’d had the courage to ‘jaw’ instead of dropping firebombs on neighborhoods that contained no strategic targets.