Reagan Decides Final Strategy for Arms Talks

President Reagan on Tuesday gave Secretary of State George P. Shultz his final instructions for dealing with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei A. Groymko when the two superpower diplomats meet next week in Geneva.

Reagan’s “final marching orders”--as they were characterized earlier by the White House--were delivered during a late-afternoon strategy meeting with Shultz, Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger and Robert C. McFarlane, the President’s adviser on national security.

The one-hour, 45-minute session was held at the golf course estate of publisher Walter H. Annenberg, where the President celebrated the new year.

Talks With Japanese

Reagan will end his four-day Palm Springs holiday today and fly to Los Angeles for a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone. Administration officials say the President will gently prod Nakasone to lower Japanese trade barriers for U.S. exports such as telecommunications, computers, medical supplies and forest products and also outline basic U.S. strategy for the Shultz-Gromyko meeting next Monday and Tuesday.

No specific details were announced of Tuesday afternoon’s Palm Springs meeting of Reagan and his top foreign policy advisers. But an assistant White House press secretary, Mark Weinberger, said after the session that “the President finalized his instructions on how Secretary Shultz should represent the U.S. position in talks” with Gromyko at Geneva.

One senior Administration official, speaking on condition that he not be identified, said the main topic was how to respond to any “Soviet gambits.”

Reagan may confer again with Shultz when he returns to the White House on Thursday, presidential aides said.

Although the exact details were not disclosed, the broad outline of U.S. strategy for the meeting aimed at coaxing the Soviets back into negotiations on nuclear arms reduction--has already been made known.

The President has made clear, through public statements of his own and those of his advisers, that he does not intend to accede to a Soviet demand to cancel research on a possible space-based missile defense system, known popularly as “Star Wars.”

The senior official said the Administration does not consider it feasible to negotiate over research because of the virtual impossibility of verifying compliance with a research ban. Reagan, however, previously agreed with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that any future deployment of a “Star Wars” system would require renegotiation of a U.S.-Soviet anti-ballistic missile pact.

But because the United States is eager to draw the Soviets back into negotiations on reduction of intercontinental and intermediate-range nuclear missiles, it intends to suggest at Geneva that arms bargaining be divided into two categories: one for these offensive weapons, and another for defensive systems, such as “Star Wars” and anti-satellite devices.

The anonymous senior Administration official said Tuesday that the negotiations on intercontinental and intermediate-range weapons either could be conducted jointly in combined bargaining or in separate talks, as they were before the Soviets walked out of arms discussions in late 1983 in protest of the deployment of modern Pershing 2 and cruise missiles in Western Europe.

But regardless, he said, these negotiations would be coordinated under one umbrella.

The official cautioned that “a long process” is ahead and that “there will be many more meetings” before any serious negotiations can get under way.