THE REYKJAVIK SUMMIT : Reporter’s Notebook : Gorbachev Takes a Novel Approach

After he and President Reagan failed to reach agreement at their summit, Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev told a news conference Sunday that the Soviet Union still can not afford to ignore the United States but must deal with it.

“There was a character in a Russian novel who wanted to close down America,” said Gorbachev, not naming the novel. “She couldn’t do that. We can’t do that.”

When word spread that the conference had failed, one Soviet aide asked another, “Who blinked?”

The second aide replied, “Both blinked.”

The rules of the Soviet Communist Party require that all members be atheists, and Raisa Gorbachev, the wife of the Soviet leader, is no exception. But she sat in a little Icelandic church Sunday.

“I am an atheist,” she said, “but I know the church. . . . I respect all faiths. It is, after all, a personal matter.”

Before entering the small, 140-year-old wooden Lutheran chapel in Burfell 50 miles from Reykjavik, she stood on the steps and wrapped her silver fox jacket around a 5-year-old Icelandic girl shivering from the cold.

“A Russian fur will keep you warm,” she told the girl.

During the summit, the Icelandic government could not shake its anxiety over the possibility of foreign terrorists attacking the two leaders.

On the eve of the conference, in fact, Icelandic police reportedly received word from Soviet secret police that two or three Libyan terrorists were trying to reach Iceland. Security was tightened. The Libyans did not show up.

But on Sunday, the last day of the conference, it seemed for a few hours that a terrorist attack really had been mounted. The Icelandic government radio announced that police arrested three armed men in a boat entering Reykjavik harbor.

When all the details came in, however, it turned out that it was not a terrorist attack at all. The three arrested men were Icelanders whose weapons were for hunting dolphins.

The Greenpeace group, an organization advocating environmental and disarmament causes, was denied permission to dock its ship Sirius in Reykjavik harbor during the summit, but it tried to do so anyway Sunday.

Two Icelandic coast guard ships intercepted the Sirius, and coast guardsmen boarded the ship and forced it to go back to the harbor at Hafnarfjordur, six miles south of Reykjavik.

Officials of Greenpeace said they wanted to advertise the need for a nuclear test ban treaty.

“Our intention today was simply to pass through the bay to deliver a peaceful message on a banner,” said Greenpeace spokesman Eric Fersht. “We posed a threat to nobody.”

The Icelandic government, however, tried to allow as few demonstrators as possible into the capital during the summit conference.