What if Fort Knox were jeopardized?

Factual Questions
1

What if Fort Knox were jeopardized? Say with a “dirty” bomb, one spashing radioactivity everywhere.
Would the gold be just as valuable if you couldn’t enter the area for a decade or more?

2

This is exactly the plot behind the movie Goldfinger (a James Bond movie).

The US has been off of the gold standard for a long time so I’m not sure it would have much effect in that regard. Anyone who owned gold however would find what they had was much more valuable (again the premise behind Goldfinger).

3

YOu are assuming that there is some huge quantitiy of gold stored in Ft. Knox currently.

That may not be the case.

4

Oh no, not that again! :slight_smile:

5

evilhanz I didn’t mean anything conspiratorial in what I said. As a coin dealer, I am aware that the US has converted huge quantities of gold into American Eagle gold coins.

I was just shooting from the hip, but in good faith. Gold today isn’t the thing of legends which were common years ago.

Is there a recent thread which would tell about the gold that the US stores in KY? Or about where the US Gov’t gets the gold it used to make and sell American Gold Eagles?

6

Fort Knox is the largest, but not the only, storage site for America’s gold bullion; New York City, for example, has another major gold deposit. So even if Fort Knox got nuked, the US would still have plenty of gold on hand.

Beyond that, gold no longer represents anything more than a psychological comforter in the American economy. There is no legal relationship between the value of a dollar and the amount of gold the American government holds. The gold in Fort Knox is just another asset, and in terms of the economy as a whole, not a major one.

However, because economics is based on symbols, the destruction of Fort Knox would probably have a financial factor far above the actual cost of the loss.

7

If a terrorist is going to come up with a “dirty” bomb, it would make more sense for it to be used in a populated area, which would scare the bejeezus out of everyone, rather than going through a heavily defended Fort Knox to reenact a James Bond movie.