U.S., Soviet Officials Begin Drafting Detailed Plans for Summit

U.S. and Soviet officials began drafting detailed plans Wednesday for next month’s summit meeting, despite unexpected new problems that threaten to delay completion of the arms control pact that is the planned showpiece of President Reagan’s meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Soviet negotiators in Geneva have balked at providing the technical information necessary to complete work on a treaty outlawing nuclear missiles with a range of 300 to 3,000 miles, a U.S. official said. If Moscow continues to hold out, he said, the summit meeting might have to be postponed or even canceled.

Although a Soviet official told reporters in Moscow on Tuesday that Gorbachev is considering extending his stay beyond the currently scheduled three days so that he can see more of the United States, U.S. officials said the Soviet advance team spoke only of a relatively short visit confined to Washington.

In a brief comment to a reporter after a Veterans Day speech, Lt. Gen. Colin L. Powell, director-designate of the National Security Council staff, said that the two sides are planning “strictly a business meeting.”

Powell and Assistant Secretary of State Rozanne L. Ridgway led the American advance team through a two-hour opening meeting. Later, the two sides broke up into lower-level working groups to talk about logistics, scheduling, press coverage, security, communications and other matters that go into a meeting of superpower chiefs.

The Reagan Administration originally proposed a full-dress, coast-to-coast summit that would have included meetings in Washington, at Reagan’s Santa Barbara ranch and possibly in the Midwest. The Soviets rejected that suggestion at the time, but U.S. officials said that if Gorbachev now wants to expand on the current summit plans, the Administration almost certainly would agree.

Another U.S. official said that 25 to 35 technical issues on the intermediate-range missile treaty remain unresolved and that most of them cannot be completed until Moscow provides full information about its arsenal of such missiles. The two nations agreed earlier to exchange such information, but the Soviets have not yet made it available.

He said there has been “not very much” progress at the negotiating table since Oct. 30, when Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze said that the pact was 98% complete and predicted that it could be wrapped up in plenty of time for Reagan and Gorbachev to sign at a meeting beginning Dec. 7.

Max M. Kampelman, the chief U.S. negotiator who also serves as counselor at the State Department, is scheduled to fly to Geneva this weekend for talks early next week with Soviet First Deputy Foreign Minister Yuli M. Vorontsov. The meeting was scheduled before the latest negotiating snag developed, but it is now expected to concentrate on that issue.

U.S. officials say that, if Kampelman and Vorontsov are unable to break the logjam, Shultz and Shevardnadze may meet again before the end of this month, probably in Geneva, to try to get the negotiations back on track. It would be the fourth Shultz-Shevardnadze meeting since mid-September.

“We’re down to the green eyeshade level--the kind of details that nobody thought we would ever get to a year ago,” an American official said. “But these issues have to be resolved, and to do it, we have to have the data.”

Numbers, Locations

The proposed intermediate nuclear forces treaty would require the superpowers to dismantle all their missiles in the 300- to 3,000-mile range, including “spares” that have never been deployed, and to stop producing such weapons. U.S. officials say that such a pact cannot be verified unless both sides report the exact number and location of the missiles.

By relying on satellite photos and other intelligence reports, the United States can determine the approximate numbers of deployed Soviet missiles. But without information supplied by the Soviets, there is no way to be sure how many weapons are in storage.

A U.S. official said it is a “sea change” in Soviet policy for Moscow to agree to supply the information, even though it has not yet done so. He said the United States remains hopeful that the Soviets eventually will come through with the numbers.

“It’s a niggling little thing and maybe it will go away,” he said of the delay. “But we’ve got to the point where we’ve got to have that information.”

U.S.-Provided Base

In the negotiations that produced the strategic arms limitation treaties of 1972 and 1979, both delegations worked from a statistical base supplied by the Americans. The Soviets refused to disclose their own count of weapons.

The earlier treaties limited only the number and type of weapons each side could deploy. The pacts did not restrict arms that were kept in warehouses, so it was not necessary to engage in the sort of detailed exchange of information needed under the new pact.