bothering insects and not even touching bacteria. The lesson of paleontology was clear: the greater the destructive force, the smaller the systems that escape it. The atom bomb required the particularization of both soldier and army. But in the twentieth century the idea of making soldiers the size of ants was only a fantasy. You could not reduce people in size or diffuse them. So thought was given to robot soldiers, humanoid, though even then that was a naive anachronism. Industry was unhumanizing itself, but the robots who replaced workers on the assembly line were not made in the likeness of men; they were, rather, human parts selected and enlarged: a brain with a big steel hand or a brain with eyes. But giant robots had no place on an atomic battlefield. So radioactive synsects (synthetic insects) were developed, and ceramic shellfish, and titanium worms able to burrow in the earth and come out after the blast. Flying synsects were airplane, pilot, and missiles all in one tiny entity. The operational unit became a microarmy, fighting only as a whole, much as a swarm of bees acts as a unit to survive while an individual bee is nothing. Thus microarmies of many kinds were made, on two opposing principles. An army based on the principle of independence proceeded like a column of ants or a cloud of germs or hornets. An army based on the principle of teletopism, however, was an enormous flying or crawling collection of self-assembling elements; according to need, tactical or strategic, it could reach its target in extreme attenuation only to condense there into its programmed whole. The simplest example was the self-dispersing atomic warhead. An ICBM could be tracked, from space by satellite or from Earth using radar; but it was impossible to detect a cloud of infinitesimal particles of uranium or plutonium at very low density, which finally would converge and reach critical mass at its target, a factory or an enemy city.
For a while the old and new weapons coexisted, but the massive machines soon succumbed to the invisible micro. As germs secretly enter an animal organism and kill it from within, so did these unliving microbes penetrate cannon barrels, shell chambers, the engines of tanks and planes, and eat through metal, and detonate the ammunition inside. What could a brave, grenade-carrying soldier do against a microscopic, unliving adversary? He would be like a doctor trying to fight a virus with a hammer. Against an autonomous cloud programmed to destroy all things biological a man in uniform was as helpless as a Roman legionary standing with sword and shield before a rain of bullets.
Even in the twentieth century the tactic of fighting in closed ranks was replaced by the spreading out of troops, but there were still front lines. Now there were none. Microarmies easily penetrated all defenses. Nuclear weapons were ineffective combatting that viral contagion. The cost of a warhead, moreover, cannot be considerably greater than the value of its target. One doesn’t use a destroyer to go after leeches.
The most vexing problem in this unhumanized stage of man’s struggle with man turned out to be that of telling friend from foe. In the past it had been done by electronics, using the password principle. Challenged by radio waves, a plane or missile either transmitted back the correct answer or was attacked. This twentieth-century method became obsolete. Now the makers of arms borrowed from the plants and animals, from bacteria. For the recognition process they imitated the ways of living species: immune systems, the duel of antigen and antibody, tropism, mimicry, protective coloration, camouflage. A microweapon might pretend to be an innocent microorganism, or the fluff of a plant, a piece of pollen, but beneath that exterior lay corrosive death. The significance of informational combat also increased—not in the sense now of propaganda but as the invasion of enemy communications, to paralyze it or, as in the case of
For a while the old and new weapons coexisted, but the massive machines soon succumbed to the invisible micro. As germs secretly enter an animal organism and kill it from within, so did these unliving microbes penetrate cannon barrels, shell chambers, the engines of tanks and planes, and eat through metal, and detonate the ammunition inside. What could a brave, grenade-carrying soldier do against a microscopic, unliving adversary? He would be like a doctor trying to fight a virus with a hammer. Against an autonomous cloud programmed to destroy all things biological a man in uniform was as helpless as a Roman legionary standing with sword and shield before a rain of bullets.
Even in the twentieth century the tactic of fighting in closed ranks was replaced by the spreading out of troops, but there were still front lines. Now there were none. Microarmies easily penetrated all defenses. Nuclear weapons were ineffective combatting that viral contagion. The cost of a warhead, moreover, cannot be considerably greater than the value of its target. One doesn’t use a destroyer to go after leeches.
The most vexing problem in this unhumanized stage of man’s struggle with man turned out to be that of telling friend from foe. In the past it had been done by electronics, using the password principle. Challenged by radio waves, a plane or missile either transmitted back the correct answer or was attacked. This twentieth-century method became obsolete. Now the makers of arms borrowed from the plants and animals, from bacteria. For the recognition process they imitated the ways of living species: immune systems, the duel of antigen and antibody, tropism, mimicry, protective coloration, camouflage. A microweapon might pretend to be an innocent microorganism, or the fluff of a plant, a piece of pollen, but beneath that exterior lay corrosive death. The significance of informational combat also increased—not in the sense now of propaganda but as the invasion of enemy communications, to paralyze it or, as in the case of
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