a rehash of the Cairo Declaration. The government does not think that it has serious value. We can only ignore [] it. We will do our utmost to complete the war to the bitter end." Suzuki apparently recognized that the Potsdam declaration flagged an intention to end a war which, in logistical terms, Japan was no longer capable of sustaining. However Article 6 stated that the militarists would be stripped of their authority and power forever, and the Japanese army was resolutely opposed to its own thorough dismantlement, and heavy pressure was brought to bear on the Prime Minister therefore to have him reject the declaration. Suzuki's stating that the declaration's terms would be literally 'killed off by silent contempt' (mokusatsu) reflected this necessity of placating the extreme position of the army. John Toland also argued decades later that Suzuki's choice of the term was dictated more by the need to appease the military, which was hostile to the idea of "unconditional surrender", than to signal anything to the Allies. Although mokusatsu may not have been intended to communicate to the Allies a refusal to surrender, the Potsdam ultimatum nevertheless allowed for only one acceptable answer: unconditional surrender. Any other answer would, as the declaration warned, cause "prompt and utter destruction". It was only after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs, two assassination attempts on the then Prime Minister Suzuki Kantarō, an attempted military coup against the Emperor, and declaration of war by the Soviet Union that the Emperor himself broadcast acceptance of the terms of the Potsdam Declaration that resulted in Japan's unconditional surrender, which ended the Pacific War. Postwar controversy Five years after the end of World War II, Kazuo Kawai, a lecturer in Far Eastern history at Stanford University, first raised the idea that an incorrect translation directly led to the bombing of Hiroshima. Kawai based his argument on notes and diaries written at the time, notes taken while he covered the discussions underway in Japan's Foreign Office regarding the Declaration. Kawai argued that both the choice of this term and the meaning given to it by Allied authorities led to a fatal 'tragedy of errors' involving both Japanese bureaucratic bungling and a 'deficiency in perception' by Japan's enemies. Kawai's point was then taken up by William J. Coughlin in a widely read article for Harper's magazine three years later. In some reconstructions that