WASHINGTON - After President Bush signed a 2002 nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia, the U.S. intelligence community concluded that it would be unable to verify reliably whether the Kremlin was abiding by the pact.

The intelligence agencies issued the warning because the treaty didn't require that each side be allowed to inspect the other's long-range nuclear missiles and bombers and warhead storage facilities. The Bush administration had opposed mutual inspection during negotiations with the Russians.

Some U.S. lawmakers and many arms-control experts raised similar concerns about the lack of verification mechanisms in the 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, or SORT, after it was concluded.

The intelligence community laid out its misgivings to Bush, his senior advisers and members of Congress a month after he and Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the treaty.

The assessment, which reflected the consensus of 15 civilian and military intelligence agencies, concluded that Russia's precarious finances would force it to slash to about 1,500 the number of nuclear warheads deployed in bombers, submarine-launched missiles and intercontinental ballistic missiles.

But the assessment said there could be circumstances in which Russia could deploy without detection by the United States a few hundred more warheads than the 2,200 allowed by SORT.

Bush's decision to sign an arms reduction agreement with no verification procedures was an attempt to move the Cold War U.S.-Soviet rivalry toward a Russo-American partnership. After he and Putin met in June 2001, Bush said: "I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. ... I was able to get a sense of his soul." Bush later added that he'd liked Putin because he'd referred to "a higher power."

Since then, however, Putin's attempts to interfere in Ukraine's election, his continuing efforts to maintain influence over other former Soviet republics, and his attacks on critics in the press and the business community have strained relations.

At a news conference on Monday, Bush said that during his second term, he would discuss with the Russians ways to give each side access to the other's nuclear storage facilities.

"I think one of the things we need to do is give the Russians equal access to our sites, our nuclear storage sites, to see what works and what doesn't work, to build confidence between our two governments," he said. Bush and Putin plan to meet in February.

A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Bush was referring to joint efforts to prevent nuclear materials from falling into the hands of terrorists and that the administration wasn't changing its position on the lack of verification measures in the treaty.

SORT, signed by Bush and Putin on May 24, 2002, required the United States and Russia to reduce by Dec. 31, 2012, the number of nuclear warheads installed on long-range bombers, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched missiles to no more than 2,200.

At the time, each side had an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 warheads on long-range missiles and bombers.

Unlike earlier strategic arms reduction treaties, the pact didn't require the two countries to destroy warheads and launchers taken out of service, allowing them to keep as many as they wanted in their reserve stockpiles, poised for rapid redeployment.

Moreover, the treaty lacked the robust verification measures, such as regular on-site inspections, that had been the cornerstones of ensuring both sides' compliance with earlier treaties.

Those pacts included the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, which was signed by Bush's father and required the sides to slash their deployed warheads to no more than 6,000 by 2001.

But START's expiration in 2009 - three years before SORT must be fully implemented - will end all onsite inspections and other verification measures that Russia and the United States now undertake.

In its assessment, the intelligence community said that if START verification procedures were extended through 2012, it would be able to verify Russian compliance with SORT with a high degree of certainty. Without such an extension, the United States could no longer know with certainty what the Russians had.

The Bush administration had other reasons for excluding verification from the treaty. The White House and Pentagon wanted to preserve U.S. flexibility to increase the number of deployed nuclear warheads beyond the SORT limit in the event of renewed tensions with Russia or the emergence of a new nuclear-armed rival.

At the time, experts also saw the administration's push for the treaty as a way of soothing the impact on Russia of Bush's decision in late 2002 to withdraw the United States from a treaty banning both sides from deploying nationwide anti-missile defenses.