Yeah. Fighting to end was the idea, more or less.
Japan was ruled by a junta of Imperial Japanese Army and Navy officers. To say that their military 'constantly placed zeal over survival' seems like an understatement.
Every single military member of the war council opposed surrender even in the face of nuclear apocalypse and impending invasion. Only the impotent civilian ministers were in favor of accepting the allied terms. Fortunately, the emperor spoke up decided himself..
I think you're talking around the point, here. The Allies gambled that the Japanese regime and populace were not so wholeheartedly committed to unending resistance as to accept obliteration as an appropriate cost. This proved to be correct. What magical aura did the atom bombs possess, that they could convince the Japanese to realise the jig was up, which the greatest army to menace Japanese shores since Kublai lacked?
Perhaps the Emperor asserting himself was instrumental in forcing Japanese surrender, but he didn't assert himself because atom bombs are scary and vast hosts of invading soldiers are not. That's a a specifically American Cold War anxiety onto a time and place in which it is wholly inappropriate. He asserted himself because Japan had quite plainly lost the war, and the only variable was how much life and land had to be devastated before the regime was willing to accept it. If the bombings had an effect, it was only the timing of his intervention.
Actually US commanders didn't expect Japan to surrender. So they deployed the bombs where they believed they'd be most militarily useful rather than for shock and awe value.
ie preparing for the upcoming invasion of Kyushu. Hiroshima was the HQ and logistics center for the Kyushu garrison. The other two targets Kokura and Nagasaki were vital to keeping Kyushu linked and supplied.
That may have been the rationale for the targets, but very few people involved believe that they were
simply a tactical measure. The Allies had already called for the unilateral surrender of Japan, and it's unusual to make that kind of demand so late in a war if you don't at least
hope they're going to accept it. The big division was between those who believed that more bombs were necessary to make the point, and that two was already a barbaric excess; the surprise wasn't that Japan surrendered, it's that it surrender after two bombings specifically.
At any rate, the decades of apologia that have since accumulated have stressed the alleged necessity of the bombs to prevent a costly invasion, which, as I said, seems to rely on attributing to a single large explosion some almost magical power to circumvent the normal operation of the Oriental hive-mind that a thousand smaller bombs does not possess. If it turned out that the atomic bombs were instrumental in Japanese surrender only accidentally, that the US high command was quite prepared to accept the incineration of thousands of civilians as a merely tactical measure, then they were every inch the blood-thirsty cannibals their harshest critics made them out to be, they were just stupid, lucky cannibals, which is hardly more flattering.
I'm not sure that it's either-or between being dogmatic and pragmatic. You could say that the justification for the atom bombings rested on the assumption that the powers that were in Japan were pragmatic enough to see the threat of imminent nuclear holocaust (with no chance of a glorious, heroic resistance) as a reason to surrender, but dogmatic enough that they wouldn't feel the same about anything else.
It's unlikely that the Japanese regime had any idea what a "nuclear holocaust" was, though, or any reason to fear it. The bomb had only just been invented and its implications only hazily understood by its builders, let alone by people who only discovered it when the sky over Hiroshima burst into flame. The atomic bombs were an imposing super-weapon, I'll grant, but there wasn't yet any fundamental distinction drawn between them and conventional weapons except in the destructive force you could pack into a single bomb casing. That isn't even something that emerges until a few decades into the nuclear age; 1950s Americans may have worried about the ability of Soviet nukes to flatten every city in the country, but the assumed consequence of that was invasion and occupation rather than radioactive apocalypse. Their terror of the atomic bombs was that they only required a single bomber carrying a single bomb and were therefore far harder to defend against than a swarm of bombers carrying conventional ordinance, and if the Japanese regime was allegedly content to see every city in the Home Islands conventionally incinerated, there's no reason to think they should have been particularly anxious about those cities being atomically incinerated.
Either the Japanese regime were prepared to watch Japan burn and the populace ready to follow them into this collective act of national seppuku, or they weren't. The atomic bombs are in this question nothing but another weapon in the vast arsenal of Allied destructive power.