The line separating war and peace, having long been blurry, was now completely erased. The twentieth century had dispensed with the formal declaration of war and introduced the fifth column, sabotage, cold war, and war by proxy, but that was only the beginning.
Summit meetings for disarmament pursued mutual understanding and a balance of power but were also held to learn the strengths and weaknesses of the enemy. The world of the war-or-peace alternative became a world in which war was peace and peace war. First, wide-range subversive activity was conducted under the mask of official peace: the infiltration of political, religious, and social movements, even such worthy movements as those to protect the environment; the infiltration also of the culture and mass media, taking advantage of the illusions of the young and the conservatism of the old. Then covert military activity intensified to the point of being overt, except that it was invisible. Acid rain had been known in the twentieth century; now rain fell that was so corrosive, it destroyed the roofs of houses and factories, roads, electrical lines, but no one knew whether this was pollution or the enemy sending poison clouds their way. It was thus with everything. Farm animals died in epidemics that could have been natural or intentional. A storm that flooded the coast might have been an act of God or the clever redirection of a hurricane at sea. A drought - a normal disaster, or one caused by the secret switching of heavy clouds with light. With seismic, meteorological, and epidemiological counterespionage and reconnaissance the scientists had their hands full. More and more of the scientific community became involved with intelligence work, yet the results of their research grew less and less clear. The tracking down of saboteurs was child's play in the days when they were human; but now, when the suspect was a hurricane or hailstorm, or a crop or cattle disease, or the rise in infant mortality or cancer rate, or even a meteor (the twentieth century had already considered the idea of aiming an asteroid at enemy territory), life became intolerable. Intolerable not only for the man on the main street but also for heads of state, who were helpless and confused, and their advisors no less. The military academies added new courses such as cryptotactics, cryptocountering (that is, taking counterespionage to the nth power), crypto field theory, and finally cryptocryptics, the secret study of the secret use of secret weapons indistinguishable from natural phenomena.
To blacken the enemy, one could fake a natural disaster in one's own country - in a way that made it obvious it was not natural. Also it was proved that certain rich nations, helping those less fortunate, put a drug into the supplies of wheat, corn, and cocoa it sold (cheaply), which caused impotence. This was, then, a secret war of birth control. Although the catastrophic consequence of such escalation was obvious - wherein victory was equivalent to defeat for both sides - the politicians continued with business as usual, concerned more about the voters than the future, making fuzzy promises and being increasingly less able to affect the course of real events. War was peace, not from Orwell's totalitarian doublethink but because of a technology that erased the boundary between natural and artificial in every aspect of human life and its environment.
Where there is no difference between natural and artificial protein or between natural and artificial intelligence, misfortunes caused deliberately cannot be distinguished from those caused by no one. Just as light that falls into a black hole cannot pull itself out of that gravitational trap, so humanity at war, reaching the secrets of matter, cannot leave the trap of technology. It wasn't the governments, heads of state, monopolies, generals, or pressure groups that made the decision to invest everything in the new arms, it was fear, fear that the Other Side would discover, invent, and develop first.