James Nicoll Reviews

Lt. General¹ Daniel O. Graham’s 1983 High Frontier is a substantially expanded version of his 1982 High Frontier. Graham’s book shares a title with Gerard K. O'Neill’s High Frontier; they differ in that O’Neill was interested in the civilian uses of space, whereas Graham’s topic is the military use of space. More specifically, ballistic missile defense or BMD. You may be more familiar with his proposal as the Strategic Defense Initiative (as its fans called it) or Star Wars (as its detractors called it).

Is there an alternative to Mutually Assured Destruction that does not involve capitulating to Communist Russia? Graham believes that there is.

Graham asserts that the Soviets have superior propaganda, more will, shorter procurement cycles, and can outproduce the US in mundane military equipment like tanks and ships. While the US has nuclear weapons, the Soviets has those as well. It’s entirely possible that the Soviets might be able to successfully conduct a preemptive strike. Even if the US could retaliate, the results would be apocalyptic.

Although the Soviets are in almost every respect superior to the US and its allies, the US does have one advantage: superior technology. Graham puts forth a case that ballistic mission defense is within the US’s grasp. This would have many advantages, not least of which would be making first strikes less likely to leave the US defenseless.

While ground-based BMD² could be an important part of defending America and its allies, space, as the title suggests, is where Graham sets his hopes. Thanks to affordable access to space offered by the Space Shuttle and the improved models that will no doubt follow, a network of defensive satellites might be procured for a very reasonable amount, provided that the government can increase R&D and streamline administrative costs.

Graham then details all the side-benefits that would result, from facilitating civil defense, saving America money, reassuring its allies that the US can be depended on, and facilitating the development of space as part of the Free World’s economy.

~oOo~

This review was sparked by a mention of High Frontier on Bluesky, in the context of a discussion about Jim Baen-related works such as Destinies, Far Frontiers, and New Destinies. I wanted to provide unrequested clarification but was stymied. While I clearly remembered O’Neill’s High Frontier, my memory of Graham’s book was so vague I was not even sure I had his name right. Internet searches having failed me³, I was forced to go look in my library’s non-fiction section like some Dark Age peasant.

Justifying an expensive defense program requires a foe sufficiently formidable to justify the expenditure. Nevertheless, Graham paints a picture of the Soviet Union so glowing in almost every respect (well, it’s not a free society, but…) that it seems that the Soviets do everything better than the US and its allies. There is absolutely no hint in the book that the Soviet Union would fall apart less than a decade after High Frontier was published.

Books like High Frontier raise the question “grifter or dupe?” On the one hand, Graham was (as mentioned in his Wikipedia article) accused of fiddling intelligence reports to please his superiors. On the other, if he wasn’t a true believer, he faked it very well. One cannot rule out the hypothesis that Graham was both: he believed in BMD’s potential but also was willing to fudge the facts a bit for marketing reasons.

High Frontier abounds in pretty charts and tables⁴, as well as illustrations that the mass market edition does not reproduce well. As it is a popular science book, there’s a decided lack of footnotes, endnotes, bibliography or really, much in the way of material that would allow readers to independently verify Graham’s confidently forthright assertions⁵, very few of which panned out as he predicted.

In addition to knowledge that Graham could not have had at the time (the shuttle was not the panacea it was billed as), one notes a few details that suggest that Graham didn’t have the information needed to properly assess the proposal. Space, for example, is billed as an infinite heat dump, which is sort of true but doesn’t address how annoying heat transfer can be if you are limited to radiative heat transfer. For another, he seems to think that since asteroids have low escape velocities, asteroid ores can be easily transferred to Earth orbit.

The text is rather dry. Although it is pretty clear Graham leans Republican (the High Frontier organization he founded seems to have gone all in for Trump, although well after Graham died.) he is judicious in how he discusses Democrats, perhaps because he was aware he might someday have to pitch High Frontiers to a Democratic government. Graham also eschews spittle-flinging invective about SDI-doubters, preferring to frame them as sincere but misguided.

The paperback is a fascinating artifact. For one thing, it has a bar code, a practice that was not universal at that time. For another, it lists both a US price ($3.50) and a Canadian price ($3.95). Canadians almost always get charged a higher price (at least as a numeric value) even in those rare moments when the Canadian dollar is on par or worth more than the US dollar. Unlike many other books of this vintage, the book shows only a few signs of age.

Rereading High Frontier was a trip back in time. The back cover has a letter from a then-President Ronald Reagan who was still able to sign his own name. Among the blurbs, one from a cherubic Newt Gingrich, who had recently ditched his sick wife in favour of a much younger woman. There is an introduction by Robert A. Heinlein, noted SF author and veteran curmudgeon, and a foreword by Jerry Pournelle. Reagan is quoted on the front cover. Heinlein and Pournelle are not⁶. High Frontier has all the earmarks of something Jim Baen might have edited for Tor before leaving to found Baen Books… but the only editor actually mentioned is Dean Ing, then in the most productive era of his career.

Is High Frontier worth tracking down? Only for nostalgic SDI fans and people interested in Reagan-era space boosterism. High Frontier is out of print, but affordably priced used copies are available.

1: Graham is a Lt. General on the back cover and a General on the front.

2: Ground-based BDM seems to include the conventional machine guns of the period. ???

3: The Tor edition of High Frontier is not listed on ISFDB. OK, High Frontier is non-fiction, but Robert W. Prehoda’s Your Next Fifty Years was also ostensibly non-fiction and it is listed.

4: I did wonder how those charts were created before the advent of computers in publishing.

5: Graham resorts to proof by incredulity as well, the claim that something has to be true (or false) because the alternative is unthinkable.

6: Reagan’s ISFDB entry is much shorter than either Pournelle’s or Heinlein’s. Reagan also does not rate a full entry at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. It is a wonder he had the public profile needed to be elected president of the United States.