NEW YORK, June 14. /TASS/. Moscow seeks to continue its dialogue with Washington related to nuclear balance and disarmament, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in the second part of the documentary, headlined The Putin Interviews.
"The dialogue should continue," Putin said in the episode aired in the United States on Tuesday night, adding that any attempt to shift the global nuclear balance would be a "great mistake."
Speaking about the past century’s nuclear race, Putin said the Soviet intelligence received lots of information from a team of international scientists, who were seeking to restore global nuclear balance.
"And what are we doing right now? We are trying to destroy this balance. And that’s a great mistake," Putin said.
"When the United States created the nuclear bomb and the Soviet Union entered the race and started to actively develop the nuclear program, Russia had both Russian scientists working (and) foreign scientists, Germans primarily. But our intelligence received a lot of information from the United States," the Russian leader said. "Suffice it to remember the Rosenberg spouses who were electrocuted."
"They did not acquire that information, they were just transferring that information. But who acquired it? The scientists themselves - those who developed the atomic bomb," he went on.
"Why did they do that? Because they understood the dangers. They let the genie out of the bottle. And now the genie cannot be put back. And this international team of scientists, I think they were more intelligent than the politicians. They provided this information to the Soviet Union on their own volition to restore the nuclear balance in the world," Putin said.
The four-part documentary, The Putin Interviews, will be aired in the United States on four consecutive nights between June 12 and 15. In Russia, it will be aired by Channel One, which has already purchased the broadcasting rights.
In the interviews conducted between July 2015 and February 2017, Putin outlined his stance on current Russian-US relations, NATO’s policy in Europe and the deployment of the US missile defense system, and touched upon the allegations that Moscow meddled in the US election campaign.