At least some of America's top leadership did understand.
Meanwhile the USSR understood that , despite Hiroshima, nothing had really changed in terms of fighting and winning big wars against opponents with large territories.
They certainly didn't buy into the supposed high value of current A-bombs, as military (rather than as moral) weapons.
So, yes the western Allies could easily fight another big war right now and eventually win it , but the Russians knew they'd only do so if pushed.
They certainly weren't about to pull themselves into a new big war.
The West's prolonged unwillingness to face heavy casualties against the Germans and Japanese had made that very clear to all who were observant.
As a result, the two Great Powers's prolonged public bickering over banning atomic weapons was never really hard power talk, never really directed at each other's leadership.
Instead it was all meant for the ears and minds of international public opinion.
A soft power fight over hard power
It was all about the winning of soft (moral) power by exploiting the ultimate hard power issue : nuclear war.
A battle about which ideology (western liberal capitalism or soviet state communism) seemed more determined to use nukes and which really wanted to banish them forever.
In a sense then it was all just a highly expensive , highly wasteful , highly dangerous version of Penicillin Diplomacy by other means ....
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