I was watching *Goldfinger *last night with my kids. Goldfinger’s big scheme is to detonate an atomic bomb inside Fort Knox, thereby throwing the world’s financial markets into disarray and sending the value of his own gold holdings through the roof. I have a few practical questions:
He mentioned that the explosion would make the gold radioactive. Is that possible?
How much of the gold in Fort Knox could we recover after something like this? How much would be lost?
What would have been the real effect of something like this on the world financial markets in 1963? How about today?
as many will undoubtedly be in to tell us, the original novel has Goldfinger not as a solitary supervillain, but as a paymaster for the KGB. The plot really was to steal the gold from Fort Knox.
For the movie, someone (screenwriter Richard Maibaum is my guess) shrewdly realized that this made no sense, and substituted the “dirty” atomic bomb. This made it nifty and exotic and, in a rare switch for the movies, more plausible. (They also changed the book’s buzz-saw threat into a laser bisection, again because of the Rule of Cool.)
How reasonable? I don’t know. How much damage it does and where the gold ends up depends upon how big a blast it is and where it’s set off. Gold can certainly be made radioactive, but the half-lives are measured in days:
If all thatr happened was that the gold was radioactive, all you;d have to do is wait for the decay. But the blast would vaporize a lot of the gold, turning it into gold fallout (ground bursts are notorious for producing radioactive fallout), and it simply wouldn’t be there to gather up. I always figured Goldfinger’s plan was to vaporize the US gold supply, and smear the rest around so it was hard to reconstitute.
What effect this would have on the world economy I don’t know, but I can’t believe it would be trivial.
The thing I really can’t be;lieve is that Goldfinger took the trouble to break into Fort Knox and didn’t try to “liberate” a souvenir for himself. That’s one thing he assuredly would do.
Of course, gold is damned heavy. Much heavier than they depict it being in the film. It’s density is greater than that of lead.
As Mr. Pratchett can tell you, the monetary system is based on the knowledge that the gold is there, not the gold actually being there. Say the bomb just made the gold radioactive and didn’t vaporize it. Say the half life was 20 years. Let’s also assume that we had good records of how much gold was in there, and that everyone believed us. Then, instead of shipping the gold from place to place, we would just ship certificates with a claim to the gold, when it became available again. These could be traded just like the real gold. Impact - basically zero. Certainly far better than having the international monetary system disrupted.
If the gold in Ft. Knox was used for something useful, like coating printed circuit boards or fillings, it would be a different matter.
As to point 3, remember that Goldfinger was made/scripted/etc. during an era when the Bretton Woods System (i.e. a Gold Standard) was in force. Irradiating a good chunk of the gold supply of the US when they guaranteed soft currency convertability into gold would have either probably required the US to buy new gold to re stock (unlikely) or to abandon the system (probable, seeing as they did it 7 years later anyway)
The problem I have with Goldfinger’s plan is that he doesn’t love money, he loves gold. He says as much, he loves its “brilliance”, its “divine heaviness”. In his mind, it would be pointless to irradiate or even vaporize the U.S. gold reserve. His own gold would become more valuable, but he wouldn’t have any more of it.
According to your link, after your gold decays you don’t have gold anymore. Depending on how much of the gold would be made radioactive, this could be a significant problem.
Even more worrisome, what was up with all the mobsters? Goldfinger brings them all together and lays out the plan. One guy says he didn’t want any part of it; he is allowed to leave and then immediately killed. The rest say they want in - and are all immediately killed.
So whatinhell was the point of the whole exercise???
It’s been a long time since I read it.
Perhaps he just wanted them out of the way.
Is Goldfinger the guy M thinks is cheating at cards?
M and Bond believe him to be a Jew at first because he is funny looking, but they change their mind when they realize he has membership at some “restricted” clubs.
Remember how laying out the plan in front 007 is what set up the reveal of Cal Meacham’s favorite switcheroo? Bond, having heard the idea, promptly points out why it won’t work:
Why not lay out your plan for motivated skeptics who may well point out problems with it? Sure, the mobsters don’t wind up saying anything useful, and the only flaw Bond spots is a red herring Goldfinger threw in – but so what? Best-case scenario, they bring something to your attention in time to fix it. Worst-case scenario, you answer each derisive naysayer’s objection throughout your presentation to reassure yourself that all the angles are covered. Either way, sure, kill 'em all – but why not put assorted details up for their scrutiny first?
I’m fairly sure the idea wasn’t to make the gold itself radioactive, but to contaminate it with radioactive material, hence the references to cobalt and iodine. The blast would have driven the cobalt 60 into intimate contact with the surface of the bullion, making it fairly hard to decontaminate. Well, hard compared with e.g. hosing the bars down. It would have been possible to chemically remove the cobalt with acid, or resmelt the bars and physically seperate them, if you don’t mind handling all that radioactive material.
As to what the world would do, well I’m fairly sure that the price of gold on the markets would skyrocket in the short term and if enough people thought their dollars were now worthless, there would a few days or weeks of interesting times.
Maybe the American government could have foiled Goldfinger’s plan by putting the radioactive gold on the market. The danger of the radioactivity would have collapsed gold prices - including Goldfinger’s original gold - down below its original market value.
I think the reason Goldfinger tells the mobsters the plan is ego boost. He has a marvelous plan but wants someone, anyone, to tell him how brilliant it is. He needs someone to gloat too about his plan. He then has to kill the mobsters to keep it a secret but he gets a moment of satisfaction. This is one of the reasons he keeps Bond around, to make him self feel good.
Remember, Goldfinger “poses as … no, that’s not quite fair, is a refiner”, he’s allowed to refine gold. He is always selling some of it, to support himself. If for 58 years, he gets to sell 1/10 as much to maintain the same lifestyle, he’ll take the deal. Besides, I figured the Chinese were going to pay him, as he asks Pussy, what she’ll do with her share. I didn’t think she was getting a briefcase full of cash from Goldfinger or the Chinese. At least, not a big enough briefcase to buy her own Carribian island.
The world’s financial markets seem to be based in emotion as much as (if not more than) the logic of supply & demand.
While the gold supply in Fort Know would not affect the U.S. government’s ability to collect taxes, consumer spending, loan frequencies, or manufacturing power, there would still be a panic of some type.
I don’t know if anyone could precisely estimate how big such an economic panic would result. Possibly a big one. A lot of folks might think that such an event at Fort Know would be the first moves of WW3.
