Assume a very small nuke is set off in the Fort Knox vault. It really isn’t very deep so I don’t think the explosion would be contained underground like the real underground bomb tests. Would the gold be vaporized and become fallout? Blasted into the earth? Would any of it get converted to something else?
Most of the gold would be vaporized or impressed into the remains of the vault. A very small amount would be converted into isotopes of mercury (198Hg and more rarely 199Hg). Or course, the Chinese bomb that Goldfinger was using was salted with cobalt (and for some reason, iodine, even though that would produce short-lived radioisotopes) so even if gold could be recovered it could not be handled or physically transferred for decades.
It’s a dumb plan, BTW, because even if the value of Goldfinger’s private stocks were increased as indicated he would be under suspicion, being known to be on the area of the Fed Gold Depository just before the blast and somehow clear of it right afterward. All that iodine and other fallout is going to kill his horses and beautiful ranch. It is basically cutting off one’s nose to smite their face.
Stranger
And it’s always bothered me that Auric never stopped for a souvenir – he was right there in the vault. Even if it’s incredibly heavy (as he would have been well aware) it would have been worth it. Goldfinger wouldn’t have been able to resist the bragging rights.
“That is the only remaining bar of the original Fort Know vintage. Pick it up, if you wish.”
Assuming, of course, that he could stay out of jail.
The only real thing you could say to the advantage of the plot is that it 's better than the one in the book, where they really do try to steal the gold (or as in the old Stardust the Super Wizard comic book)
There’d be lots of gold dust fallout upwind of Kentucky…
He was certainly licking his lips over that bar of Nazi gold that Bond was baiting himself with.
Stranger
Should be trivial to separate out the nasties, though. Gold is easily separated from mercury through a chemical process, not to mention all the other stuff. The only gold isotope that would conceivably be a problem (in that it has a long enough half-life to be annoying) is 195Au, with a HL of 186 days, but I don’t think you can get that through neutron activation.
You have to handle all of the radioactive fallout to extract this paucity of gold, and then remove the massive cruft to get to the essential element. Probably not worth it in fiscal cost and certainly not in human liability.
Stranger
Certainly too much work if it all got blown into the atmosphere. But perhaps if the bomb were small enough, and the vault was substantially underground, enough could be recovered to be useful.
Subterranean vaults and nuclear bombs? This is peak post/username combination.
We must not allow a deep vault gap!!
I don’t recall… did the movie specify the power of the bomb?
Also, what is the layout of the vault(s) exactly?
I have trouble imagining gold being significantly vaporized. Generaly, people overestimate the power of explosions to completely pulverise. I’m imagining - gold being ductile- that most of it, not immediately adjacent to the bomb - would end up as a thick lining of the resulting cavity.
I think the plan was to pripyat it. Make the gold and vault so radioactive that it could not be recovered- not destroy it.
Not very explicitly. The quote I’ve seen is “small but particularly dirty.”
“Small” could hypothetically be sub-kiloton yield. The American B54 Mod 2 Special Atomic Demolition Munition (aka “backpack nuke”) could be dialed down to a mere 10 tons of TNT equivalent (.01 kt). Doing so would also make it dirtier on terms of fallout, if I recall correctly, because not all the fissiles would be “consumed” and simply vaporize to condense on fallout material.
A cart-sized warhead could high-yield (as a boosted fission weapon) but also could be small enough to destroy a very large building but not vaporize it.
One thing to bear in mind is that the gold vault is quite small. It’s only 4000 sf and 2 stories high although there may be some dead space underground before the vault begins. Would the dense gold tend to “quench” the explosion or would it be too far away for that?
The Zero Power reactor at NASA Glenn in Cleveland was surrounded by two feet of wax blocks. Ordinary Ball wax used for sealing jelly jars.
I hate to shit on my own thread but I wouldn’t be surprised if Don and his puppet will want to inspect it. Only a handful of people have ever been in there except for the employees.
Even if the gold had been rendered inaccessible, so what? The gold in Fort Knox mostly doesn’t need to be accessed, anyway. It mostly just needs to exist.
The gold is organized mostly in an inventory of pallets of serialized ingots of specified mass and composition (pure ‘mint gold’ versus ‘coin gold’) which can be audited and assayed. Gold that has been blasted into molten droplets cannot be inventoried or assayed in any practical way, and for ‘accounting’ purposes effectively doesn’t exist.
Stranger
From what I hear, they do want to inspect it. There’s rumors fake news in the right wing mediasphere that the gold has been stolen or otherwise removed and no one has seen it in 20-some years or more. Even though Munchkin Mnuchin visited it while he was Treasury Secretary.
I really hope Trump does visit Fort Knox. Maybe he’ll crack his head open diving into the gold reserves like Scrooge McDuck.
No no no, You’re not understanding the plan.
- Irradiate the gold and the vault.
- ???
- Profit
While that may be true for a few people, the majority are talking about an audit, not just looking at it to make sure that vaults aren’t empty.
They may do an audit, but Trump, if he goes there, is just going to do a look-see. Much like, I expect, Munchkin did.