Firm Accords in Iceland Not Critical, U.S. Says

President Reagan and Secretary of State George P. Shultz on Tuesday played down the importance of reaching firm agreements at this weekend’s summit meeting between the President and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in Iceland, but a ranking Soviet official asserted that the time is now ripe to settle important arms issues.

With the summit still three days away, preparations for the two days of talks fell into a pattern of careful psychological fencing designed to establish basic positions before the two leaders meet face to face.

At a White House meeting with leaders of human rights organizations Tuesday afternoon, Reagan said he intends to “make it amply clear to Mr. Gorbachev that unless there is real Soviet movement on human rights, we will not have the kind of political atmosphere necessary to make lasting progress on other issues.”

It was the second time in as many days that the President pointedly suggested that human rights stands at the top of his priorities in the impending talks. The emphasis served as a response to conservatives who are skeptical about the recent move toward Washington-Moscow agreements and as a damper on the growing impression that an agreement on intermediate-range nuclear missiles is all but in hand.

Visit by Orlov

Reagan’s return to the human rights subject at the White House meeting was dramatized by the presence of Yuri Orlov, the Soviet dissident who arrived in the United States on Sunday after spending seven years in prison labor camps and two more years in Siberia for his criticism of human rights abuses in his native country.

“Peace is not simply an absence of war,” Reagan told leaders of about two dozen human rights organizations. “It’s the presence of justice. And human rights, human freedom, are its indispensable elements.

“These fundamental values and beliefs are matters on which we Americans cannot and will not compromise. So our agenda at the Reykjavik meeting will deal not only with arms reductions but Soviet human rights violations, military intervention by the Soviets and their proxies in regional conflicts and broadening contacts between our two peoples.”

The President spoke only a few hours after Shultz, in briefing reporters on the U.S. perception of the meeting, declared that “nothing expresses the difference between our societies more vividly than the differences in our attitudes toward individual human beings. . . .

“There is a crying need for more observance of freedom of religion, more readiness to accept the fact that people can be critical without having to be thrown in jail and more readiness if people want to leave a country to let them leave.”

But while Reagan and Shultz were emphasizing that they do not see the Iceland meeting as an occasion for signing agreements, Deputy Soviet Foreign Minister Vladimir F. Petrosky said at the United Nations that Moscow wants to see agreements concluded at Reykjavik. Specifically, he mentioned Gorbachev’s No. 1 topic--a nuclear test ban.

“This question is ripe for solution,” the Soviet official said. “Now there are no obstacles whatsoever. We have made it clear that we are ready to accept any kind of verification.”

Although he agreed that the Saturday-Sunday summit in Iceland will help prepare for a full-blown superpower meeting in Washington, he said the central purpose this weekend “will be to give impulses to arms agreements.”

Reagan is due to leave for Iceland on Thursday and spend most of the day Friday relaxing and preparing for three sessions with Gorbachev on Saturday and Sunday.

Indicating the mounting importance of the hastily arranged meeting between the two leaders, Shultz on Tuesday suggested that the Soviets may be about to remove some of their troops from Afghanistan to generate favorable publicity while worldwide attention is focused on the meeting.

Rudy Abramson reported from Washington and Don Shannon reported from the United Nations.