counteruse

The act of using something against someone or something.

The critical challenge now is not how to ward off a sneak attack but how to control an escalation that occurs in plain sight — for instance, a conventional conflict that goes wrong, leading to nuclear saber rattling, leading to the first use of a few small nuclear weapons on the battlefield, leading to the counteruse of small nuclear weapons, leading to much of the world sliding uncontrollably into extinction.

To use something against (someone or something).

By the story's end, both sides are using and counterusing this technique, evading each other "to and fro along an ever increasing complexity of mutually perpendicular time axes." Indeed, the final count exceeds 75(!) time axes, making two-dimensional time look rather skimpy by comparison.