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Target USA

The world did not have the facility of watching the terror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or, Dachau and Ravensbruck, unfold before them in 'live' telecasts, but the horrors of New York and Washington, yesterday must have had the biggest ever television audience in human history.

The sheer scale of the devastation in New York alone was so powerfully portrayed by global television that surely the all the world's people will now be moved to act. At least now, the world's nations and governments must realise the need for international collective action - not merely to swiftly counter such terrifying violence but also to, equally swiftly, redress the conditions of intense physical and psychological suffering that provoke such violence.

The human toll in these strikes in the USA by yet unidentified groups is expected to be in the tens of thousands, although it may not top the current record of deaths in a single strike suffered by Hiroshima where between 100,000 to 200,000 Japanese civilians died in a single atomic blast in August 1945. Added to the immediate human toll is the massive disruption of economic and social life in America with the shutting down of all flights and the massive security precautions affecting civilian life and movement.

If the economic impact is already evident in the slump in stock markets, the long term political impact is only now unfolding. Western political commentators themselves are now warning against any retaliatory military action that targets groups or individuals or even states without convincing proof of complicity. There is also the danger that those peoples of societies and states known to be hostile to the USA could become targets of ethnic phobia.

The response to yesterday's terror must come in concerted global action to bring to justice those who have caused it and also to alleviate the conditions that give birth to such extreme violence.

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