Playing hardball.

MORAL INDIGNATION at the murder of the 259 people aboard Pan Am flight 103 and of 11 inhabitants of Lockerbie by terrorists as yet unknown is justified but misplaced. It will strike the terrorists as impotent ranting, a substitute for action. A determination to respond would be the best reply. But what response is available?

Additional security precautions? These are well worth exploring, but quite inadequate in comparison to the problem. They may make life more difficult for the terrorist bomber, but no advance precaution, however stringent, can guarantee the safety of the traveling public.

Legal sanctions, such as extraditing and trying terrorists? This is a liberal absurdity, like bringing charges of assault against individual soldiers in an invading army. Terrorist states, where the criminals seek refuge, would never cooperate in bringing them to justice. And the legal process would never touch the infrastructure of terrorism: the camps where terrorists are trained, the cooperative network of terrorist organizations, and the terrorist states that provide passports, training, weapons, and a safe haven. Yet those who manage and protect terrorism are as guilty as those who plant the bombs.

Economic and diplomatic sanctions, then? Certainly the West should impose stringent sanctions on Czechoslovakia, which supplies the undetectable plastic explosive Semtex to terrorist groups via proxies like Libya. But will it? And if so, for how long? The U.S. abandoned its mild sanctions against Syria (for its attempted planting of a bomb on another plane in London) after 18 months. Most other states did nothing in the first place. There is, quite simply, no stomach for sustained penalties, especially if they are irksome to the countries imposing them.

That leaves military reprisals against the terrorist training camps and the states that harbor them. Mrs. Thatcher seemed to oppose this as representing the primitive justice o"an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth." But primitive justice is better than no justice at all, which is what the above remedies offer. And a military reprisal would serve wider purposes than justice, notably obstructing and deterring future terrorism by destroying the terrorist infrastructure and killing terrorists. The example of the Libyan bombing suggests that such reprisals have a salutary effect.

We should therefore launch a bombing raid on whichever terrorist camp provides the easiest and most useful target. It does not matter if another group was guilty of the Pan Am bomb. All such groups are different divisions in the same terrorist army. Libya, which continues to harbor them and which is known to have supplied Semtex, offers a further target: Colonel Qaddafi's "pharmaceutical" plant, which intelligence sources believe to be intended for chemical warfare. Shooting down the two Libyan MiGs was justified on the simple grounds of self-defense. Destroying Qaddafi's capability to wage chemical warfare would be self-defense for civilization as a whole, Terrorists last month destroyed a large plane. We must not allow them next time to destroy a large city.