The Man With the Golden Eyes
What if we have less time than we think? What if the countdown timer to the American debt bomb is ticking faster than we think? And what if there’s no way to defuse it?
Friday, June 27th, 2025
Laramie, Wyoming
By Dan Denning
There’s a giant hole in the plot of the final scene of Goldfinger, released on Christmas day 1964 and starring Sean Connery (the best Bond of them all). Recall that the villain of the story, Auric Goldfinger, with the help of his henchman OddJob (best Bond henchman of all time) has hatched a plot to detonate a Chinese-made nuclear dirty bomb in the very heart of Fort Knox.
The devious plot wasn’t designed to destroy the gold. It was designed to irradiate the gold and make it, literally, radioactive and unusable as the base ‘risk free’ asset of the world economy. It would also have reduced the global supply of gold. Goldfinger wanted to increase the value of HIS gold holdings (a robbery would have been logistically impossible, and that’s assuming the gold is/was actually there).
The hole in the plot is that Bond breaks the lock covering the bomb’s internal mechanisms by smashing two gold bricks against it. A ‘Good Delivery’ gold bar, the kind stored (so we’re told) at Fort Knox is 400 Troy ounces, or about 27.4 pounds. If you look at the way Bond handles the bars, you know they’re not real gold, which would be way too heavy and unwieldy to jimmy the lock of a nuclear dirty bomb.
In any event, Bond gets the lock open…and then has no idea how to defuse the electrical timer. He stares at moving parts and wires for a few seconds. Then reaches in to randomly tug at some wires. Just in time, the real bomb expert steps in to flip a switch and the countdown to detonation ends. With 0:07 left.
My question for you this week, which I’ll aim to answer in this note, is, ‘What if we have less time than we think?’ What if the countdown timer to the American debt bomb is ticking faster than we think? And what if there’s no way to defuse it?