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Does Bond's Goldfinger math check out?
I'm just re-watching Goldfinger and it occurred to me to question the statistics Bond sounds off when he's talking about the gold in Fort Knox, and I wondered if any one else had verified his assumptions. Of the following, what if any is true? Here's the recap of Bond's assumptions:
- There is $15 Billion in Ft. Knox (as of 1964. What is it now?)
- That's suposed to weigh 10,500 tons
- That amount would take 60 men 12 days to load onto 200 trucks, (trucks being the operative statistic in this line.)
- Then he estimates that Goldfinger would have two hours before the " Army Navy Air Force and Marines make you put it back". (Was that a reasonable response time in 1964?)
- Also, Goldfinger states that when the bomb goes off, the gold would be unusable for 58 years, (or until 2022. Is this accurate?)
- Goldfinger also estimates that his gold will increase in value ten fold. (Does this mean that the US holds 1/10th of the worlds gold?)
If any one has any info to any contrary statement I'd be curious to hear what you have to say, proving or disproving these statements.
- There is $15 Billion in Ft. Knox (as of 1964. What is it now?)
- That's suposed to weigh 10,500 tons
- That amount would take 60 men 12 days to load onto 200 trucks, (trucks being the operative statistic in this line.)
- Then he estimates that Goldfinger would have two hours before the " Army Navy Air Force and Marines make you put it back". (Was that a reasonable response time in 1964?)
- Also, Goldfinger states that when the bomb goes off, the gold would be unusable for 58 years, (or until 2022. Is this accurate?)
- Goldfinger also estimates that his gold will increase in value ten fold. (Does this mean that the US holds 1/10th of the worlds gold?)
If any one has any info to any contrary statement I'd be curious to hear what you have to say, proving or disproving these statements.
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Comments
"In 1960, the U.S. held $19.4 billion in gold reserves... By 1970, the U.S. only held $14.5 billion in gold."
-I'd say Bond's 15 Billion was pretty accurate.
"Highest Fort Knox gold holdings this century: 649.6 million ounces (December 31, 1941)."
"Even so, the Fort Knox depository is second in the United States to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's underground vault in Manhattan."
- So I guess the US wouldn't be in a panic.. the majority of their gold would not have been irradiated.
"All of the gold in the depository, if pure, could form a cube 20.3 feet (6.19 m) on a side—a volume of 237 m³. In comparison, all the gold ever refined in history (an estimated 165,000 tonnes) is about 40 times greater, so the facility alone holds about 2.5% of all gold ever refined."
- Volume wise, 200 trucks is manageable... weight wise.. you'd need a train (like in the book!) but Goldfinger didn't want to steal anything, so this issue is void. Money wise, these are modern numbers. I could easily see Fort Knox holding 10% of the worlds gold 50 years ago..
"Gold has only one stable isotope, so all natural gold has an atomic weight of about 197 (called Au-197), and this isotope has a reasonably high neutron activation cross-section. So exploding a nuclear weapon would probably lead to a lot of radioactive gold. However, there is only one isotope of gold that has a half-life of more than a few days (Au-195, 186 days), and it is impossible to produce this isotope by neutron irradiation. So any radioactive gold would lose its induced radioactivity within a month or so."
-So, no, it wouldn't be 58 years. The article does go on to say that anything else around the bomb site, like concrete, rock, etc. would stay radioactive longer ("Fort Knox building materials used included 16,000 cubic feet of granite, 4,200 cubic yards of concrete, 750 tons of reinforcing steel, and 670 tons of structural steel). Even then, the site claims it wouldn't be more than a decade before radiation was at a manageable level.
"According to the Wall Street Journal, it is being projected that the cleanup of Fukushima could take up to 40 years to complete."
-If you scale that down from the amount of radiation of a modern nuclear facility, a few years for one bomb seems pretty reasonable.
I do remember being disappointed when I finished the book. Did Fleming ever visit Kentucky? I feel perhaps writing from the confines of distance and no direct experience may have impacted his story.
I do think, however, the film is more excusable. Knowledge of things like Fort Knox and radiation wasn't commonplace. People knew buzzwords and generalized ideas about things like nuclear bombs, so it was easy to dramatize it. I'd argue Goldfinger has one of the best settings matched with it's story ever. The whole film revolved around this one plan at this one place, and then the plot twists to reveal the whole plan was part of a plan.
Getting full access to one of the World's largest gold depositories, let alone a military base, doesn't happen these days. One of the first times "Bond opens doors", as Barbara puts it, happened. I'm glad they took the opportunities they had, and I think they pulled off quite a neat and unique little film.
I'm pretty sure the amount of watch-lists the US government has me on tripled with all my searching on nuclear bombs, gold, radiation, Manhattan, and Fort Knox.
I'm not so sure. I think the Fort Knox set piece sells itself just because it's so captivating. While it is more interesting to think that you could steal all the gold, like in the book, the film plot does seem more plausible. Either way though, the idea of the set piece is enough to keep you interested in both plot lines...
Have nothing to go off of and presumably the writers didn't either. So we'll call that a push for the first three items.
I could buy the Army, Air Force and Marines being there within two hours in 1964. I imagine if the soldiers had really been wiped out at Fort Knox, there would have been another base closeby that could have responded. The Navy might take a little longer since Fort Knox isn't exactly on a shoreline.
Given info provided on radioactivity for gold, I would also theorize that this was really a foolish plan.
proves that. I will say no more for fear of hurt feelings
Indeed, but what of the radiation on the material around the gold (concrete walls, metal doors, etc. ? I'm pretty sure that the recovery of said gold would pose quite a few problems because of that. Think of Chernobyl.
Great point. We all accepted it and off we run with the caper. I'm not surprised that the plan is far fetched. We see far fetched things in a lot of films and we can accept them. Warp drive, the Predator's invisible technology, etc.
Some things we just can't accept : like that invisible car in DAD...
But regardless of the radiations, wouldn't the gold be melted or affected by the force of the blast itself?
I'm no scientist, so I have to draw a blank on all the scientific aspects of a nuclear device detonated inside Fort Knox, though there has been some sterling research done into this area by other community members as the detail of this thread clearly shows.
Good point! The gold would melt, yes. But it had already been melted before-into bars. it would not have stayed liquid or lost its value.
In the 60s the US dollar was still tied to the value of the gold reserve, and I can practically guarantee that Johnson would have ordered the gold salvaged regardless of the consequences.
Fort Knox isn't just some concrete building in the middle-of-nowhere Kentucky. It's an active military base, with an entire community around it. It'd be impossible to effectively cover up a nuclear blast with thousands dead and tens-of-thousands affected.
The most viable option for the government to cover it up would be to say that, indeed, there was no gold there. Instead the US government was using it "to secretly store a prototype nuclear warhead and a malfunction occurred resulting in a catastrophic explosion."
But even then people would be highly doubtful.
Yes, but not sure how easy it would have been to get the gold back and then melt it again. As I understand it would have melted with metal, mixed with concrete, etc. And still be radiated to begin with, which would have made the operation far more complicated. And until the gold is salvaged, if it can be salvaged, in whole or in part, it is gone and worthless.
This discussion was not intended to determine whether Goldfinger's plan would have worked, but as the title suggests, was meant to check Bond's assumptions about how much the gold weighed and how long it would take to put it into how many trucks in order to steal it...
;)
http://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/articles/villains_goldfinger.php3?t=gf&s=gf&id=0261
The damage created by an atomic bomb is a combination of the initial blast and the resulting radiation. Unlike most villains who have had their hands on "small nuclear devices", Goldfinger did not plan to blow anything up, instead using the "dirty" effect of irradiating the gold.
Physicists state that gold, in theory, could become radioactive from a cobalt-iodine atomic device (which Goldfinger claimed to have sourced from the Chinese) after gaining an extra neutron from the streams of subatomic particles let out by the blast.
Goldfinger claimed this radiation would keep the US gold reserve untouchable for 58 years. However, the radioactive form of gold is very unstable and would turn to liquid mercury within days. So instead of making the gold reserve untouchable, Goldfinger would completely destroy it. Although his prediction on what would happen to the gold was wildly inaccurate, his expected stock value might still go up by 10 times, like he claimed in the film.
You might find this of interest-
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/08/view_to_a_kill/?page=3
Off topic:The US has shipped most of their gold to China and the UK since then anyway, to pay off debt.
It seems you must have.. um.. forgotten my previous post:
To summarize, the only stable forms of gold have a radioactive "half life" of a few days, meaning they would be down to safe levels of radiation for protected human handling within a week of Goldfinger releasing the radiation. And his plan was never to explode the bomb, just irradiate the gold. Even if he did explode the bomb, the radiation emitted couldn't form the unstable isotope of gold anyway. Science.
So Goldfinger wouldn't keep the gold irradiated long enough for his gold's value to rise very much.
BUT the concrete and metals surrounding the gold in the structure of the building would be very radioactive for decades. The US government would have to send in a huge 'suicide squad' to retrieve the gold, and even then they probably wouldn't make it very far without waiting a few decades.