The two sides agreed to set up working groups on a number of issues, including strategic nuclear arms cuts, to work toward agreements that could be signed when President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin meet again in May or June.

Both presidents have called for slashing strategic nuclear weapons arsenals by more than two-thirds over the next decade, from 6,000 warheads to between 2,200 and 1,700.

But the two sides remained at odds over a US plan to keep decommissioned warheads in reserve in case conditions change and Russia's insistence that the cuts be formalized in a legally binding document.

"We are for transparency, we are for predictability, but also we are for irreversibiity of the reduction of the nuclear forces," said General Yury Baluyevsky, the deputy chief of the Russian general staff.

"We are following the principle that the whole nuclear weapons should be destroyed," he said after the meetings at the Pentagon.

Moreover, he said, Russia wanted any agreement to be signed by the two presidents to be legally binding.

"You are talking about a statement, I am talking about a legally binding document," he said in response to a reporter's question.

Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, said the United States was not looking "to recreate arms control-style negotiations or agreements" of the kind reached with the Soviet Union.

"We do think there are useful things that we can do so that misunderstandings about each others force structure are reduced," he said.

"Once we have decided what we agree on we will pick the appropriate form for it. We're completely open-minded on the subject, we're not ruling anything in or anything out. We're taking a very pragmatic approach."

He said they agreed to set up working groups on variety of areas including on measures to lend "transparency and predictability" to the nuclear arms reductions.

Working groups will explore other areas of cooperation as well, including missile defense, counter-proliferation, and counter-terrorism, said Feith, who led the US delegation.

On missile defense, Baluyevsky reiterated that Moscow considers Bush's decision last month to withdraw unilaterally from the ABM treaty a mistake.

But he said, "We are working very hard, looking for mutual ground on which we can keeping work in the future."

US officials said that they will use the verification regime established under START I treaty as a starting point for ensuring that both sides strategic nuclear policies are transparent and predictable.

But the US side is looking at other measures as well, including more detailed exchanges of information, visits to certain sites and different kinds of inspections, said JD Crouch, assistant secretary of defense of international security policy.

All rights reserved. � 2002 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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