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There is some limited dissent even from this almost univer sally held view. According to Lateran University's Monsignor Ferdinando Lambrushchini, the destruction of military objectives with nuclear weapons might be morally more justifiable than the bombing of cities with TNT. However, the moral condemnation of nuclear war is relatively obvious and easy. What is often overlooked is the fact that the very horror of using nuclear weapons may have inaugurated a new era in which limited, conventional wars are likelier than before. It is precisely in such limited conflicts that the old just-war principles seem pertinent again. Some churchmen deny this. Says the Rev. Paul Oestreicher of the British Council of Churches: "If the technical criteria of the just war are taken at face value, this is tantamount to pacifism, because no modern war conceivably measures up to them." Nevertheless, most of the moral objections advanced against the Viet Nam war are generally put in terms of the just-war principles, and they move quickly from moral abstraction to practical questions. Among the chief arguments: > Aggression or Civil War. A government's right to make war in self-defense was reaffirmed by the Vatican Council in a statement that otherwise direly warned against the evil of total war. Some Viet Nam critics believe that the Korean War involved a legitimate case of self-defense because the Communist attack occurred clearly across an established border line, and was carried out by an organized army; besides, South Korea's defense was a U.N. action. In contrast, they consider the Viet Nam conflict a civil war. This overlooks the fact that there is such a thing as indirect aggression, and every realistic observer knows that outside Communist help for the Viet Cong is a decisive factor.
> Civilian Casualties. Killing civilians for the purposes of terror and demoralization is morally indefensible, all theologians and moral philosophers agree, violating the just-war principle of discrimination. The conditions of warfare in which a factory can be as much of a military installation as an airfield has created inevitable new hazards for noncombatants. And Mao Tse-tung's dictum, "There is no profound difference between the farmer and the soldier," underlies the special problems created by guerrilla warfare. The U.S. is not deliberately trying to destroy and demoralize civilians; it is guerrilla tactics and terror that attempt this. Writes Dr. Paul Ramsey, professor of Christian ethics at Princeton: "If the guerrilla chooses to fight between, behind and over peasants, women and children, is it he or the counterguerrilla who has enlarged the legitimate target and enlarged it so as to bring unavoidable death and destruction upon a large number of innocent people?"
> — The Possibility of Victory. Obviously, neither side in Viet Nam can win, some critics argue, and thus to continue a painful war of attrition, which is gradually destroying the whole country, is indefensible. It violates the just-war principle that victory must be a reasonable possibility. Yet victory could mean various things, including an undramatic fading-away of the Viet Cong or an internationally enforced compromise. Thus defined, victory may still be called remote or even unlikely, but it is by no means impossible.