Gorbachev Meets Reagan, Hints at More Proposals : Two Leaders Talk for Four Hours in ‘Good’ Atmosphere; No Details Given

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, after meeting President Reagan for the first time in the opening session of the summit, indicated Tuesday that he has brought new proposals to the bargaining table and will raise the possibility of an early resumption of U.S.-Soviet arms control negotiations.

Although both sides agreed to a news blackout until the conclusion of the two-day summit, U.S. and Soviet spokesmen described the atmosphere as “good” throughout almost four hours of first-day meetings, including nearly two hours of one-on-one talks initiated by Reagan.

Under a cold, gray sky laced with occasional hints of snow, the leaders of the world’s two superpowers met in the manicured splendor of a 19th-Century mansion known as the Fleur d’Eau, whose surrounding stone walls had been decorated with concertina wire.

Detachments of Swiss soldiers in camouflage battle dress and police officers wearing leather coats patrolled the surrounding woods as Reagan and Gorbachev first chatted before a crackling fire in the mansion’s library, then summoned their aides for more formal discussions.

Nothing Substantive Yet

Almost nothing emerged about the substantive details of the two leaders’ discussions, and a Soviet spokesman said after the morning session, “At this date, we are still not anywhere near the signing of an agreement.”

Gorbachev made it clear he has still not given up his fundamental opposition to President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, the space-based defense research program commonly called “Star Wars.”

“These arms are more dangerous than ever, . . . and we may all wind up being hostages of these weapons,” he was quoted as saying at one point Tuesday.

Still, at least at the level of personal diplomacy, the external signs were widely viewed as positive.

The personal talk in the library, originally scheduled for 15 minutes, stretched to more than an hour. And during the afternoon, Reagan persuaded Gorbachev to cut short the formal session and stroll along the edge of the surrounding woods. They paused for more talk in the mansion’s pool-house, where another fire roared in the fireplace.

Reagan told reporters that he and Gorbachev exchanged cordial greetings and said he believes that they “both share the same goals.” But the President refused to discuss the substance of their discussions.

White House spokesman Larry Speakes said the Reagan team will strictly abide by the agreement that, until the summit ends later today, neither side will disclose any details of the summit sessions except for the names of the participants and the length of the discussions.

With Administration officials adhering carefully to the blackout, the limited comments of Soviet spokesmen and remarks by Gorbachev himself provided most of the information available Tuesday to the thousands of newsmen gathered here.

Gorbachev, who had said earlier that he had not come to Geneva with empty hands, made the disclosure about new proposals during an extraordinary 40-minute audience he granted to the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the civil rights leader and 1984 presidential candidate.

During the luncheon break, Jackson and about 50 members of several peace groups went to the Soviet Mission to deliver nine boxes of petitions calling for a freeze on nuclear weapons. Unexpectedly, Gorbachev himself received them.

The Soviet leader, in an apparent reference to the Strategic Defense Initiative, told Jackson: “The time has come to put an end to these developments and discuss disarmament. We have brought with us here to Geneva a number of proposals.”

It was also during the encounter with Jackson that Gorbachev warned about the danger of the SDI program.

Reagan sidestepped questions by a group of reporters who were permitted to query the two leaders as they prepared to begin their opening session. Asked what he would say to persuade Gorbachev he wanted peace and whether he planned to invited the Soviet leader to Washington next year, the President said, “All of those are things to be discussed at the meetings.”

More Forthright

Gorbachev, smiling and animated at times, was more forthright as he responded through an interpeter. Asked if he thought the two nations ought to reconvene the Geneva arms negotiators before they are scheduled to resume talks Jan. 16, he replied in tones that suggested he endorsed the idea. “Yes,” he said, “that is a question which I will take up with the President.”

The idea of a speedy reconvening of the Geneva arms negotiators is something that both sides apparently discussed in pre-summit negotiations. A senior American official familiar with the arms talks said it probably would be easy to get the talks restarted immediately after the summit.

But he questioned whether it would be mere “cosmetics” rather than a serious impetus to move the negotiators toward an agreement.

The official also disclosed that the Soviets were so eager to send Gorbachev back to Moscow from the summit with some kind of arms control agreement that, in recent weeks, they put pressure on U.S. arms negotiators to try to reach a pre-summit agreement on at least a minor part of their original proposal for a 50% reduction in offensive nuclear missiles.

Although U.S. negotiators had rejected the overall Soviet proposal as unbalanced and unfair, they responded by focusing on a subsection of the proposal to see if they could reach an agreement in time for Reagan and Gorbachev to announced it at the summit.

The initiative for a hurry-up agreement in time for an announcement at the summit came in early October when a member of the Soviet arms negotiating team approached former Sen. John Tower (R-Tex.), a member of the three-man American negotiating team, during a cocktail party at Tower’s residence.

In exploring one area of the Soviet proposal, Tower came up with a formula he thought could lead to an immediate reduction of strategic weapons and submitted the proposal to his Soviet counterpart, according to a senior U.S. official. However, the Soviet negotiator, his ability to respond rapidly apparently hampered by the Soviets’ vast bureaucracy and tightly disciplined system, has not yet submitted a counterproposal, the official said.

Reagan and Gorbachev were scheduled to begin the summit with a 15-minute, one-on-one session, but they apparently found the planned chat so fruitful that the President, as host for the first day, extended the session to 64 minutes. They began at 10:14 a.m. (Geneva time) and ended at 11:18, talking alone except for two interpreters.

As a result, the morning’s plenary session, which included half a dozen top assistants for each leader, was much shorter than scheduled; it lasted from 11:25 a.m. until 12:20 p.m. Both morning sessions were to be devoted to an overview of U.S.-Soviet relations.

No one-on-one meeting had been planned for the afternoon, which was scheduled to be devoted to arms control issues, but again Reagan decided to deviate from the schedule. After meeting in a plenary session from 2:35 p.m. to 3:45 p.m., the President suggested that he and Gorbachev walk down a gravel road and continue their discussion alone with just their interpreters in a small pool-house not far from Lake Geneva.

There, sitting in two large easy chairs before an open fireplace, they talked from 3:55 p.m. to 4:44 p.m.

Speakes called the lengthy private sessions an “unexpected development” and said they underscored the “good atmosphere” in which the summit was taking place and the serious nature of the discussions.

Speakes said the session had not been planned in advance, adding, “The President, I think, felt at a certain point in the meeting that it was a desirable tine for the two to continue their talks alone.”

While Reagan and Gorbachev walked, their advisers remained at the table and continued their discussions, although Speakes said he did not know whether they talked about arms control, the issue that had been on the agenda.

Gorbachev, at a dinner he hosted for Reagan at the Soviet Mission in Tuesday night, was asked why he and Reagan were spending so much time together without other officials being present. “We think it’s useful to have face-to-face contact,” he said.

Reagan’s only comment, when asked how things were going in their discussions: “We’re still smiling.”