Vladimir Putin: Dear colleagues and friends,
I am very happy to have the opportunity to visit a centre which, without any exaggeration, has strategic importance for Russia.
It would be appropriate today to discuss a number of problems that are important for the safe and stable development of our nation. Above all, this concerns the work of ensuring the reliability and stability of military systems.
The quality of nuclear weaponry, which has been and remains the foundation of Russian security, should meet the highest requirements on universality of use, effectiveness and safety.
Your institute is one of the largest centres of modern science in the world. It boasts a concentration of talent along with the knowledge of entire generations of great scientists. This powerful intellectual, industrial, scientific and technological capital should serve the country in full measure.
We must strive for the maximal effective use of the potential of the Russian Atomic Energy Ministry’s nuclear centres to conduct a very wide spectrum of scientific-research and experimental-design work.
Currently you are concentrating on improving the complexes of nuclear weapons that are under development or which have been developed. However, since the beginning of the 1990s, your specialists have also actively cooperated with developers of non-nuclear types of weapons and now we have had the opportunity to make sure of this. Colleagues told me about it. The developments are very interesting. This work, of course, needs to be continued and developed in every way possible.
Today your institute’s science-intensive developments and projects, which were created on the basis of modern military technology, are also used in various branches of industry and are capable of successfully competing in international markets. Therefore, it is necessary to maximize the use of you centre’s developments in order to manufacture products for the civilian population and to use the most modern nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.
That is all that I wanted to say to begin with. Thank you for your attention. Now we will share opinions and proposals.