Reagan and Sakharov Assess SDI : Disagreement Noted; President to Meet With Kohl, Thatcher

WASHINGTON — Meeting with Soviet physicist Andrei D. Sakharov, President Reagan opened a week of foreign policy discussions Monday, defending the “Star Wars” missile-defense program and declaring that Moscow’s restriction on human rights will continue to irritate U.S.-Soviet relations “until it’s completely eliminated.”

At the same time, Reagan said that his Administration has had “great success” in negotiations with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev on human rights issues, calling him “more cooperative than any Soviet leader before him.”

Reagan made his comments during a photography session in the Oval Office as he met with Sakharov. The 20-minute meeting gave Reagan a forum for reiterating his support for the Administration’s “Star Wars” effort, the space-based, missile-defense program formally known as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), as a way to force the Soviets to the bargaining table.

The President will meet today with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and on Wednesday with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. These sessions, taking place near the end of Reagan’s tenure, will amount to farewells but also will focus on relations between the superpowers and on the prospects for encouraging Western allies to share more of the defense burden of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

After the Reagan-Sakharov meeting, White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater acknowledged that the Soviet thermonuclear physicist, Nobel laureate and noted human rights activist had expressed his concern that the “Star Wars” program could impede progress in Soviet-U.S. arms negotiations.

But Fitzwater said that the President called the system “a valid concept and a good idea and possible to achieve.” Fitzwater said Reagan further described it as “a form of protection should some madman or anyone else use nuclear weapons.”

Sakharov, who suffered a seven-year internal exile for his opposition to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, credited Reagan with helping free political prisoners in the Soviet Union but noted that others remain in Soviet jails.

The 67-year-old physicist mentioned specifically two Soviet dissidents, Vasif Meylanov and Mikhail Kukobaka. According to Sakharov, who spoke through an interpreter, Meylanov was forced into exile in Gorky in 1980 after protesting Sakharov’s arrest, and Kukobaka was jailed in 1970 “because he refused to bear false witness against a foreign diplomat.”

First Trip to U.S.

Sakharov, who was allowed to return to Moscow from his exile home in Gorky two years ago, is making his first trip to the United States, traveling for two weeks as a board member and official Soviet delegate to the International Foundation for the Survival and Development of Humanity. He came to Washington after making appearances in Boston and New York and was honored by the National Academy of Sciences at a dinner Sunday.

As about 100 invited guests, including Soviet Ambassador Yuri V. Dubinin, applauded and stood to toast Sakharov, the tall, gaunt physicist stepped to a podium to express thanks for the support American scientists had given him during his exile years.

And he had a message for those who fear that Gorbachev’s reform program known as perestroika will produce a stronger, more threatening adversary. The threat “consists not in its success,” he said, “but in the possibility of its bloody failure. This would be a total calamity.”

Staff writers William J. Eaton and Robert Gillette contributed to this story.