The full text: The atom bomb is a paper tiger which the U.S. reactionaries use to scare people. It looks terrible, but in fact it isn't. Of course, the atom bomb is a weapon of mass slaughter, but the outcome of a war is decided by the people, not by one or two new types of weapon.
Mao said this during an August 1946 interview with American journalist Anna Louise Strong, re-published in volume IV of the Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung (Beijing, 1960).