November 18, 1982

The American Telephone and Telegraph Company said yesterday that it plans to raise up to $1 billion in the near future through a new offering of common stock, its second equity offering of that size in the past 18 months. The company raised $1 billion in June 1981 through a public stock offering that remains the largest in history. The company said yesterday that it would disclose how many shares the new issue would entail when it filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Bell's offering in June 1981 involved 18.15 million shares. At yesterday's closing stock price of $61.725, it would have to issue 16.2 million shares to realize $1 billion.

France decided today to ask private investors to finance more than half of the large industrial investment programs it wants the 11 major companies it nationalized earlier this year to start in 1983. The Cabinet, hoping to revive the stagnant French economy, agreed that state-owned companies competing with private industry will get a total of about $4 billion in new funds next year, nearly twice what they are expected to get from the Government this year. Brokers and bankers cautioned tonight that it was too early to judge whether the private capital markets would be prepared to lend the necessary funds because the Socialist Government had not decided on the precise terms under which the new financing would be sought. However, the Government bonds issued to compensate shareholders in the nationalized companies were well received on the Paris Stock Exchange because of the highly atttractive yield they carried.

A key member of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party has told a group of Japanese journalists that talks with China could result in a pullback of troops from the Soviet-Chinese border. Participants in a conference of Japanese and Soviet journalists being held here confirmed today that the Soviet official, Viktor G. Afanasyev, who is the editor of Pravda, the party newspaper, made the remark on Tuesday during a meeting at Pravda's offices. The suggestion was similar to one that a Chinese official was reported as having made to Western journalists in Peking during a background discussion last month after the resumption of Soviet-Chinese negotiations. Efforts at an Accommodation Kyodo, the Japanese news agency, quoted Mr. Afanasyev as having said: ''It is possible that the two sides might promise each other a reduction of military forces in border areas.'' A reporter for the agency later said the quotation was accurate. (Although the United States has deliberately not been voicing public concern about the improvement of Soviet-Chinese relations, Washington officials say privately that they find the trend worrisome. Page A7.)

Six persons, including four children and their pregnant mother, were killed here this morning in a fire in a three-story tenement that a judge had condemned because of extensive fire and safety violations. Neighbors said the mother, with her youngest child in her arms, had screamed for help from the third-story window but had refused to jump or to drop the child. They said smoke then engulfed her and she disappeared from view. Ossie Laurin, who operates the Econ-O-Wash laundry a few doors from where the fire occurred, said the woman, Myra Reeves, had called to him from the window during the fire.

''We will not spend what we do not have. We will not defer needed actions in the hope that somehow everything will turn out all right in the end.