A 1 5 THE WASHINGTON POST, TUESDAY^ MARCH 7, 1978  
Despite all the talk of tough government action to end the coal strike, no good options are really open to President Carter. In practice, application of the Taft-Hartley Act, which the president invoked yesterday, will probably bring only a fraction of the men back to work, and seizure of the mines by the government poses immense political and managerial problems.</br></br>So the best hope is to continue the negotiations on a different level. Instead of industrywide bargaining, this time the talks would have to go on a state-bystate and district-by-district basis.</br></br>CarterÛªs invocation of Taft-Hartley, to be sure, looks inviting. It mandates a return to work for 80 days under the terms of the last best management offer, with a fact-finding board to try to sort out remaining differences. Thus the mines r,eopen, and there is a mechanism for adjusting unsettled issues.</br></br>But Taft-Hartley has a bad name with the unions and working people in general. Though the law provides sanctions for union officials who defy the return-to-work order, no action can be taken against spontaneous refusal to work by individual workers. The miners learned</br></br>Given the overwhelming opposition shown in the negative vote on the last offer, the strong expectation is that while union officials will urge compliance with the law, many miners will refuse. The best guess of one of the government officials who has been closest to the talks from the beginning is that not more than 20 percent of the miners will go back to work in response to a Taft-Hartley injuction.