October 2, 1986

International The U.S. hopes to use the talks in Iceland next week to spur arms control agreements that would be worked out at a later full-scale summit meeting in the United States. President Reagan and Mikhail S. Gorbachev will meet in Reykjavik on Oct. 10 and 11. [ Page A1, Column 6. ] Moscow also expressed hope for progress on arms control at the meeting in Iceland. A Soviet spokesman said the talks should give a ''strong impulse'' to the stalled Geneva negotiations. [ A6:1-2. ]

Companies Northwest Airlines' parent may buy up to 100 Airbus planes for as much as $3.2 billion in a deal that could be one of the most extensive steps taken by an American carrier to improve its fleet. NWA Inc. is obligated to buy just 10 of the planes from Airbus Industrie. But some analysts said the carrier would probably order all 100 from the consortium, which is owned by the Governments of Britain, West Germany, France and Spain. NWA is buying the new A320-200 planes, which seat 150 passengers. [ Page D1. ] South Korea gave 3 American companies first right to negotiate contracts, worth an estimated $500 million, for work on two nuclear plants to be built by the mid-1990's. The companies are Combustion Engineering, Sargent & Lundy and G.E. [ D1. ]

Three years ago, amid growing concern that the litigation process was being abused, the judiciary toughened Rule 11, providing sanctions against frivolous litigation and overzealous lawyering. For those who feel they have been the target of such tactics, Rule 11 may now offer the best revenge - but it is stirring increasing controversy in the legal community. Some lawyers contend that Rule 11 is getting in the way of innovative lawyering. Others, however, say that it is, just as intended, curbing, or at least punishing, transgressions. Fighting a Libel Suit Dow Jones & Company, for example, has invoked Rule 11 to fight back against the Liberty Lobby, a right-wing group that has sued Dow Jones for libel. Liberty Lobby charged that Dow Jones, publishers of the Wall Street Journal, libeled it in an article describing the group as anti-Semitic.

The South African Foreign Minister called Farm Belt Senators tonight and said Pretoria would cut off grain purchases from the United States if the Senate voted Thursday to override President Reagan's veto of a bill imposing economic sanctions on South Africa. The Foreign Minister, Roelof F. Botha, also said Pretoria would no longer transport shipments of American grain through its territory to neighboring black-governed countries. Senator Richard G. Lugar, an Indiana Republican who is chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, told a hastily called news conference that the threat amounted to ''intimidation and bribery'' and ''an affront to the decency of the American people.'' Action Called 'Despicable' His voice trembling with anger, Mr. Lugar asserted, ''I find this entire action - by a Foreign Minister of a foreign country, calling Senators off the floor - to be despicable.''

A picture caption in Metropolitan Report on Sept. 23, with a report in New York Day by Day about Nathan Hale Day, omitted the identity of a man beneath the Hale statue in City Hall Park. He was Robert N. McKay, president of the Sons of the Revolution in the State of New York, whose organization commissioned the statue.