August 27, 1983

Yuri V. Andropov said today that if negotiations with the United States on medium-range missiles succeeded, the Soviet missiles in Europe that Moscow is offering to eliminate would be, as he put it, ''liquidated.'' Mr. Andropov said the offer to scrap the missiles, including the three-warhead type known as the SS-20, was intended to meet Western allegations that the Kremlin would reduce its medium-range missiles in the European part of the country simply by moving them to the Asian part. The possibility that Soviet missiles in Europe would be moved to Asia has been one of the reasons given by the Reagan Administration for rejecting Soviet proposals in Geneva. Basic Position Is Unchanged But the Soviet leader's offer, which went beyond an ambiguous previous pledge, was coupled to a restatement of the basic Soviet negotiating position, an insistence that the United States abandon plans to start deploying 572 Pershing 2 and cruise missiles in Western Europe in December. (In the United States, a White House spokesman said the Administration wanted to see the full text of the Soviet statement before commenting, but said it appeared ''to be similar to previous statements.''

The following article is based on reporting by Neil Amdur and Frank Litsky and was written by Mr. Amdur. A group of United States athletes competed in the Pan American Games at Caracas, Venezuela, in the last two weeks after most of them had failed drug tests, United States Olympic officials said yesterday. William E. Simon, the president of the United States Olympic Committee, confirmed that the committee had arranged the tests at the request of about 10 of the 600 United States athletes who arrived in Caracas. Some of those asking for the tests, even before the start of the Pan American Games on Aug. 14, were weight lifters. As many as eight of the tests detected traces of anabolic steroids, Mr. Simon said.

The United States Court of Appeals here ruled today that the Department of Housing and Urban Development had failed in its duty to protect children from the poisonous effects of lead- based paint. The court said that under a 1973 law, the agency was required to ''establish procedures to eliminate as far as practicable the hazards of lead-based paint poisoning'' in any property owned or subsidized by the Federal Government. But, it said, the department under four Presidents had failed to do so. Instead, the court said, the department has narrowly construed its obligations according to a cost-benefit analysis for which there was no legal justification.

Terence Cardinal Cooke, the Archbishop of New York, is terminally ill with leukemia and could die within months, the archdiocese announced yesterday. The Cardinal does not plan to resign as the spiritual leader of 1.8 million Roman Catholics in the metropolitan area, a position he has held since 1968, a spokesman for the archdiocese said. The Cardinal is also Military Vicar for Roman Catholics in the nation's armed forces. ''The prognosis is that the disease is terminal,'' the spokesman, the Rev. Peter Finn, said. ''It's severe and it's moving quickly.''

Twenty years ago tomorrow , when a black American courted jail, a beating, or even death if he took the wrong seat, insisted on the vote or marched a public highway for the cause of equal rights, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood up in Washington before 250,000 people, the largest crowd that had ever marched in petition on the nation's capital. ''I have a dream,'' he told them, and then proceeded, in cadences that rolled like waves across the Mall, to describe a future day of harmony, justice and respect. It was not a long speech. It was one of many made that day. But it was the thunderclap, in retrospect - the vision of that enormous crowd, the vision of that dream, brought home to people everywhere what the civil rights movement was all about. It may have been the purest, broadest moment of the movement, and the march, along with Dr. King's articulation of the dignity and aspirations of millions of black Americans, is being marked by an anniversary march in Washington today.