Mao did not mention the atomic bomb in his telegrams to Stalin. He had been even more outspoken than Stalin in playing down the significance of the bomb. As early as August 13, 1945, one week after Hiroshima, he had written: “Can atom bombs decide wars? No, they can’t. Atom bombs could not make Japan surrender. Without the struggles waged by the people, atom bombs by themselves would be of no avail.”62 A year later he had said: The atom bomb is a paper tiger which the US reactionaries use to scare people. It looks terrible, but in fact it isn’t. Of course, the atom bomb is a weapon of mass
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