U.S. Says Summit Should Be Held Regardless of Arms Talks Gains

The White House, responding to a Soviet suggestion that a second superpower summit meeting be delayed unless arms control talks show immediate progress, said Wednesday that a meeting should take place this year even if arms negotiations in Geneva are stalled.

“We just want to make clear that we don’t see any linkage between the two,” White House spokesman Larry Speakes said. “We can have a productive meeting without progress at Geneva.”

In a speech Tuesday to the 27th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev assailed President Reagan’s latest arms control proposal as “swamped in various reservations, linkages and conditions.” He said he sees no sense in coming to the United States for “empty talks.”

Gorbachev suggested that Moscow and Washington must agree to halt nuclear testing and eliminate all medium-range missiles in Europe as a precondition to a meeting with Reagan.

Despite Gorbachev’s apparently uncompromising words, Soviet diplomats denied Wednesday that he was making the next meeting conditional on U.S. acceptance of a nuclear test ban and conclusion of an agreement on medium-range missiles.

At an unprecedented press briefing at the Soviet Embassy here, arms control specialist Vitaly I. Churkin and press counselor Vladimir M. Kulagin indicated that American readiness to move toward new arms agreements, rather than completion of negotiations, would persuade the Soviets to agree to a second summit meeting.

White House officials are frustrated that, after three months of trying, they have not been able to commit the Soviets to a date for a follow-up to last November’s Reagan-Gorbachev meeting in Geneva.

With congressional elections in November, the White House would prefer an early date, preferably in June, to eliminate domestic politics as a factor in the talks. The Soviets have been holding out for September on grounds that they do not want another get-acquainted session and need more time to prepare for substantive discussion.

White House officials suspect that Gorbachev’s sudden insistence that the talks be tied to progress on arms control is in part a tactic to head off a June meeting.