"When the United States created an atomic bomb and the Soviet Union began to actively develop this program, domestic, foreign scientists, primarily Germans, worked in Russia. But our intelligence received a huge amount of information from the United States," Putin told in one of the fragments from the documentary series, published on the US TV channel Showtime YouTube page late on Tuesday.
The Russian president spoke about the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in the electric chair in 1953 after being convicted of passing technical information about building an atomic bomb to the Soviet Union.
"They just had been getting the information. And who had been passing it? The scientists, who developed the American atomic bomb," Putin stressed.
The Russian leader stressed that "they realized the danger, they released the genie from the bottle."
"It is impossible to get it back in there. And this international team of scientists — probably they were cleverer that politicians — I think, they deliberately passed this information to the Soviet Union so that the nuclear balance in the world could be restored," Putin noted, adding that "we are now trying to disturb this balance," which "is a big mistake."
The second episode of the four-part documentary series by Stone, called "The Putin Interviews," will be aired on the television network on Tuesday night, while the remaining two parts are to be broadcast later in the week.
The first part of the documentary was aired by the Showtime broadcaster on Monday night.
