THE SUMMIT IN TOKYO : Soviets, Stung by U.S. Criticism, Question Interest in New Talks

After nearly a week of sharp criticism from President Reagan and other U.S. officials over its handling of the nuclear plant accident at Chernobyl, the Soviet Union has questioned whether the United States is truly interested in a meeting this year between Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher told the President on Sunday.

The question was relayed to Thatcher by Leonid M. Zamyatin, the new Soviet ambassador to Britain, who asked for her view of the situation as he presented his credentials late last week, White House spokesman Larry Speakes said.

Thatcher told Zamyatin that the United States wants to go forward with a Reagan-Gorbachev summit meeting later this year, a statement that Reagan himself confirmed Sunday during a diplomatic reception as the annual seven-nation economic summit got under way in Tokyo.

Invitation Stands

“I invited him (Gorbachev),” Reagan said in response to a reporter’s question. “The invitation’s still good.”

Speakes said that Zamyatin carried a letter to Thatcher from Gorbachev expressing “his hopes and dreams” for U.S.-Soviet relations. But the question about the prospects for a Reagan-Gorbachev meeting apparently came in a conversation between the new ambassador and Thatcher and was not mentioned in Gorbachev’s letter.

Privately, Reagan Administration officials were skeptical about Zamyatin’s inquiry. One official, speaking on condition that he not be identified, suggested that it was a propaganda ploy to shift the focus at the economic summit away from the Soviet Union’s mishandling of the Chernobyl nuclear accident to U.S. recalcitrance, real or imagined, about fixing a date for the next superpower summit.

Before his appointment as ambassador to Britain, Zamyatin held a leading propaganda post in Moscow.

Speakes charged that leaders in the Kremlin, not U.S. officials, are the ones who have been dragging their feet.

Since Reagan and Gorbachev first met in Geneva last November, both sides have been jockeying over the date of a second meeting, which they agreed at their first meeting would be held in the United States this year. Washington first sought a June meeting, while the Soviets favored a September date. The latter was too close to November’s U.S. congressional elections to suit the Administration, whose latest position is that it would now not consider holding the summit until after the elections.

Motives Unclear

“It’s hard to read into this what the Soviets are getting at” with Zamyatin’s inquiry, Speakes said late Sunday. He intimated that all the Soviets need do if they want to test American interest in a superpower summit is to name a date.

“We’ve not yet received a date,” he said.

A Thatcher aide, however, took a different view. He noted that Gorbachev’s letter was written before the Chernobyl disaster occurred, so any speculation that it was intended to deflect criticism of the Soviet Union was mistaken.

He said that Thatcher told Reagan and other leaders here that she is convinced Gorbachev wants a summit this year, “as early as possible,” in her words.

“The clear message is that they (the Soviets) are in the business of summitry, they do want to continue the dialogue, and the hope is that there will be a summit soon,” the aide said.

The Administration has taken several actions recently that have rattled the Soviets--from bombing terrorist targets in Libya, a Soviet client state, to ordering a reduction in the size of the Soviet delegation to the United Nations.

Although the Kremlin canceled an important planning meeting scheduled for this month between Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze to protest the raid on Libya, White House officials do not believe a superpower summit is in any real jeopardy.

Their conviction is based on the fact that Gorbachev faces severe economic problems at home and that he needs a successful summit to divert attention from his failure to revive the economy.

The Chernobyl incident further enhances prospects for a summit, these officials say, because Gorbachev will want to recoup his public image in the wake of what is widely seen as poor handling of the nuclear accident by his regime.