. . . Empty Chair in Stanford

Months ago Stanford University scheduled a three-day conference on East-West relations and arms control. An impressive list of speakers and panelists agreed to take part, none more impressive than Andrei D. Sakharov, physicist, Nobel laureate and a soft-spoken but relentless force in the fight for human rights in the Soviet Union. If he was not the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, his signature certainly appears on the birth certificate.

As luck would have it, Washington and Moscow had plans of their own for a three-day meeting on East-West relations, now apparently firmly scheduled for Dec. 7, the day after the Stanford conference ends.

Soviet General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev plans to fly to Washington that day for a summit meeting with President Reagan and the signing of a treaty that would dismantle medium-range nuclear missiles in and around Europe.

Gorbachev does not need permission from the Kremlin to travel to the United States. Sakharov does. And as the days creep by with no word from Sakharov or Soviet officials, doubts accumulate at Stanford that Sakharov will get the green light.

Nothing spurs speculation like silence. Are the Soviets worried that he will upstage the summit? Or that his thoughts on the Star Wars missile defense program would clutter up Gorbachev’s efforts to stifle it, or at least push it far into the future? The trouble is that nobody knows. The new Soviet policy of glasnost, of being more open about the way its system works, does not include answers to questions like that.

If the Soviets are worried about Gorbachev’s being upstaged, they obviously have more homework to do on what makes news in the United States. Sakharov, who spent nearly 10 years in exile for speaking his mind on the Soviet Union’s desperate need for intellectual freedom, for the release of what he calls prisoners of conscience and for democracy, is a towering figure who would attract America’s attention wherever he went. But he is not likely to distract the hundreds of reporters and photographers who are waiting in Washington to record Gorbachev’s every word and move.

If anything, his presence in the United States would do less to draw attention away from the summit than it would to authenticate the impression of a new look in the Soviet Union that Gorbachev has set about to create. Sakharov’s views on Star Wars are, in fact, about halfway between those of Gorbachev and Reagan. He thinks development of such a massive system, if it could be done at all, would simply start a new arms race. But he also thinks the Soviets are wrong to insist on squashing Star Wars as a condition of deep cuts in long-range missiles.

A visit to Stanford would be Sakharov’s first trip abroad in many years and a closing of the loop for one of the more bizarre episodes in East-West relations over the past decade. It was to Stanford, more precisely to physicist Sidney Drell, that Sakharov addressed scientific papers on particle physics that he wrote during his exile in Gorky. It was at Stanford’s linear accelerator that Drell ran experiments to test the hypotheses in those papers.

Sakharov supports Gorbachev’s uphill struggle against the Soviet old guard to open up his society, urging only that the barriers to freedom and dignity must be pushed much farther to the side than they have so far. Whether Sakharov is allowed to travel to Stanford is entirely up to Soviet officials. But how the rest of the world would view a decision not to let him go, under the circumstances, would be entirely up to the rest of the world.