August 4, 1983

A Defense Department spokesman said today that a United States Navy destroyer came close to a Soviet freighter off the Pacific coast of Nicaragua on Saturday and asked the vessel's destination and cargo. The spokesman said that as the destroyer, the Lynde McCormick, approached the merchant ship, the Aleksandr Ulyanov, at a point about 50 miles off the coast, the American captain hailed the Soviet captain on a bridge-to-bridge radio. The ships were no closer than three-quarters of a mile apart, the Pentagon said. According to the spokesman, the American captain asked the Russian to list his cargo and destination. The Russian, he said, replied that he was carrying trucks and other general merchandise and was bound for Corinto, a port 90 miles north of the Nicaraguan capital at Managua.

The Reagan Administration appears to have taken a calculated political gamble in its decision to join other major industrial nations in substantial intervention in foreign-exchange trading to try to guide the value of the dollar. Senior officials in the Administration said they remained convinced that transactions of this sort, if they were effective at all, had only a momentary impact on prices in the currency markets. Currency values, they believe, are determined by such basic factors as differences in the rate of growth in the money supplies of nations and by inflation among nations - not by the vicissitudes of day-to-day trading in world financial markets. Indeed, Larry Speakes, the White House spokesman, went out of his way yesterday to emphasize that ''there is no change'' in Washington's policy of intervening only when currency trading is ''disorderly.''

''I happen to be one who believes if it wasn't for women, us men would still be walking around in skin suits, carrying clubs.''

Subway riders, already suffering from a summer of poor service, will encounter a new delay beginning Monday when trains that run on the Manhattan Bridge are rerouted to make way for reconstruction work. The 74-year-old bridge over the East River has deteriorated dramatically over the last few years, in large measure because of the subway trains that rumble over the structure, according to state and local officials. Work on the bridge's four subway tracks will continue for about three months. During the first six weeks, the BMT's N and QB trains will be diverted; during the second six weeks, the IND's B and D trains will be diverted.

The Justice Department sued the General Motors Corporation today, charging that the company had sold 1980 X-model cars knowing they had hazardous brake defects. The department seeks to have the manufacturer recall and repair all 1.1 million of those cars and pay the Government $4 million in civil penalties. The suit, filed in Federal District Court here, accuses General Motors of trying to cover up the extent of the problem by providing false information to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The suit further charges that company officials, under oath in some of the instances in the Government inquiry into the defects, gave answers ''they knew or should have known'' were false. A Justice Department spokesman, Brad Marman, said the department would not specify why it was not pursuing perjury charges.