WASHINGTON, Jan. 24 (Xinhua) -- The New York Times on Friday reported that a three-year study by the Pentagon has concluded that American intelligence agencies are "not yet organized or fully equipped" to detect when foreign countries are developing nuclear weapons or ramping up their existing arsenals.

According to the newspaper, the study, a 100-page report by the Defense Science Board, said the agencies' finding "undeclared facilities and/or covert operations" -- are "either inadequate, or more often, do not exist." It calls for using some of the same techniques that the National Security Agency (NSA) has developed against terrorists.

The report is circulating just two months before President Obama will attend his third nuclear security summit meeting, set for March in The Hague, an effort he began in order to lock down loose nuclear materials and, eventually, reduce the number of countries that could build nuclear weapons.

The report concluded that potential new nuclear states are " emerging in numbers not seen since the early days of the Cold War, " and that "monitoring for proliferation should be a top national security objective -- but one for which the nation is not yet organized or fully equipped to address."

It confirmed what many outside experts have learned anecdotally: While the most famous intelligence failure in the past decade involving nuclear weapons occurred in Iraq, where the Central Intelligence Agency and others saw a program that did not exist, the bigger concern may be that major nuclear programs were entirely missed.

The Defense Science Board came to a similar conclusion. It said that in the future, satellite photographs and other reconnaissance will most likely be of limited use. Instead, it suggested that many of the cyber and big-data programs developed by the NSA should be used to detect proliferation, a bet that the United States would be more likely to pick up evidence of scientists and engineers talking, emailing, or searching for nuclear-related technologies than it would be to see a weapons facility being built.

The report did not name any specific countries that are under American surveillance because of their current or suspected weapons programs, and it implicitly called into question whether administration officials should be so confident that they would detect if Iran ever violated the nuclear accord that began this week.