Gorbachev Plans U.S. Visit in Fall : Is Expected to Meet Reagan; May Tour Plants, Farms in California

Soviet officials have told the United States that Kremlin leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev plans to visit New York in late September to attend the U.N. General Assembly meeting and then expects to go to Washington to meet with President Reagan.

If an agreement is reached beforehand in the stalled talks on banning short- and medium-range nuclear missiles, according to informed officials, the Soviet and American leaders would sign an arms accord in the setting of a full summit conference.

This would be the first U.S.-Soviet summit in the United States since the late Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev met with President Richard M. Nixon in 1973, and it would mark a historic first step by the two superpowers toward actual reduction of nuclear arms.

Lower-Level Visit

If, however, Washington and Moscow fail to produce an accord ready for signing by late September, these sources said, Gorbachev is prepared to come to Washington on a lower-level working visit to personally negotiate an agreement with Reagan.

No specific date has been set for Gorbachev’s trip, and the Soviets have indicated that it could slip to early October, according to the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Under terms both sides are said to have accepted, if an agreement is reached on intermediate nuclear forces, as the two categories of missiles have been termed at the Geneva talks, Gorbachev would extend his stay to about 10 days. In keeping with precedents set by Nikita S. Khrushchev in 1959 and Brezhnev in 1973, Gorbachev’s tentative itinerary includes a visit to California, where he would stay as a guest at the President’s ranch near Santa Barbara.

Soviet officials have asked--and the United States has agreed--to allow Gorbachev to visit both an aircraft assembly plant in Southern California and Silicon Valley near San Francisco, the center of U.S. semiconductor and computer research and manufacturing that is normally off-limits to the Soviets.

In addition, Gorbachev would visit farms and industrial food-processing plants in California’s Central Valley and, in one of his few concessions to frivolity, would probably tour Disneyland. In 1959, Khrushchev was barred from Disneyland on grounds of security.

In the event that no final arms agreement is reached, Soviet officials have indicated that Gorbachev would shorten his stay in the United States and confine it to New York and Washington.

Little Risk to Prestige

Gorbachev has said publicly several times that he has no intention of coming to the United States as a “tourist,” but would come only to conclude a substantive arms agreement. U.S. officials have long considered it plausible, however, that the Soviet leader would use the annual September opening of the U.N. General Assembly as an opportunity for a visit that carried little risk to his prestige, should the two sides fail to reach a prior arms agreement.

Gorbachev’s acceptance in July of a U.S. proposal to eliminate two categories of missiles around the world, which has come to be known as the “global double-zero” option, marked a major step toward conclusion of an arms agreement that has been the subject of negotiations since 1981.

The agreement now under discussion in Geneva would ban missiles with ranges of 300 to 3,000 miles, including the Soviet Union’s medium-range SS-20 missiles and the United States’ ground-launched cruise and Pershing 2 missiles in Western Europe that have been at issue from the beginning of the Geneva talks. The Soviets, however, followed this proposal with new demands to eliminate 72 older, shorter-range Pershing 1-A missiles owned by West Germany but armed with U.S. nuclear warheads.

U.S. officials, who have refused to put the older Pershings up for bargaining, contend that details of verification are the only remaining hurdle to an agreement, while the Soviet Union insists that the West German Pershings are the chief obstacle.

The Soviet foreign minister, Eduard A. Shevardnadze, is scheduled to meet in Washington with Secretary of State George P. Shultz on Sept. 15-17, and officials on both sides have expressed hope that their meetings will produce a compromise that would ensure a summit. If Shultz and Shevardnadze fail to do so, it would leave little time for further maneuvering before Gorbachev’s expected arrival in New York.

Soviet and American observers generally agree that both leaders are eager for a substantive summit for domestic political reasons as much as anything.

For Reagan, conscious of his place in history, it would provide a capstone to the latter phase of his presidency, an affirmation of his policy of seeking arms reduction rather than merely arms control, and a boost for his battered prestige as the 1988 Presidential campaign builds momentum.

Sharpening Political Struggle

For Gorbachev, summit plans come amid signs of a sharpening political struggle in Moscow over the pace and direction of his sweeping economic reforms, under which the Stalinist structure of centralized controls is to be largely dismantled over next two to three years and industry is to be given broad latitude to manage itself.

An arms agreement, according to U.S. analysts, would be seen in Moscow as affirming the wisdom of Gorbachev’s more flexible approach to the United States, and would help ensure the “breathing space” he seeks in order to focus on his domestic reforms.

The itinerary the Soviets have sought for Gorbachev--an aircraft plant, Silicon Valley and the high-technology farming of California’s Central Valley--reflects the high priority the Soviet leader has placed on modernizing Soviet industry and agriculture, and his curiosity about Western methods of management and ways of encouraging innovation.