In practice, Operation Goldfinger took the form of hundreds of research projects and tens of thousands of collected samples, designed to find gold in places both likely and very unlikely. Like most major projects, public or private, Operation Goldfinger was not created from scratch—it was a mix of recycled research and half-baked ideas that suddenly were given priority. The Roberts Mountains in north central Nevada had long seemed like a promising source of gold, and thus the Heavy Metals Program of the USGS took samples from dozens of areas, looking for surface minerals (such as limestone) known to be associated with gold deposits. Other studies seemed more like long shots. For decades, various scientists had found traces of gold in coal, and so the USGS sifted through coal in dozens of locations in Appalachia and the Midwest. The government even took samples from coal ash and “coal-washing waste products received from various industrial plants.” These did not yield gold bonanzas. Similarly, in the 1940s in Czechoslovakia, scientists reported finding gold in the herb Equisetum palustre, or marsh horsetail. When government scientists collected twenty-two samples from across the United States, however, they found gold concentrations well below 1 part per million, and concluded, “Equisetum would not be useful in prospecting for gold.”24
Appropriately enough for a plan called Goldfinger, much of the project’s early enthusiasm focused on state-of-the-art gadgets. The USGS developed truck-mounted neutron-activation systems, one for detecting silver and one for gold. “It is no longer necessary even to collect a sample, as long as a truck can be driven over the spot that one wants analyzed,” boasted a government report.25 The Bureau of Mines also worked on “a portable X-ray probe that can be lowered into small diameter drill holes” to find gold. James Bond would have been proud.
For Operation Goldfinger, no scientific plan was too obscure to consider: Is there gold in meteorites that hit the Earth? Is there gold in Colorado peat? Is there gold in plants and trees? Is there gold in deer antlers?26 In almost all cases, government scientists found that the answer was yes—but from those findings it hardly followed that the gold existed in quantities that even approached commercial viability.
An area of exploration that seemed especially fertile was the sea. Just as oil is found underground on land or beneath the seabed, the same geological forces that created gold deposits in, say, California also created them under the ocean floor. In the earlier part of the twentieth century, a German scientist named Fritz Haber had made a convincing case that seawater itself contained traces of gold. The ocean was a natural focus for Hornig, who worked for years on projects including desalination plants and the creation of underwater tunnels. And many of Hornig’s counterparts in and out of government were, in this period, increasingly optimistic about deep-sea mining. In 1962, the Marine Diamond Corporation of Cape Town, South Africa, launched a “diamond barge” at the mouth of the Orange River, which ended up extracting 51,000 carats of gem-quality rough diamonds from underwater gravel before it was shipwrecked a year later; by the decade’s end, Marine had recovered 1.5 million carats using these barges. Not all of the technological advances were mechanical; the navy also proposed surgically opening a hole in a diver’s windpipe and filling his lungs with a special liquid that would allow him to reach depths of 12,000 feet for up to two hours without the need for decompression.27 “The ocean is big business right now,” Hornig declared in the mid-’60s, “and the rate it’s going, it’s reasonable to expect that it will become an even bigger business in the years ahead.”28
It was not pure fantasy to think that if diamonds could be mined from the sea, so too could gold; after all, in the 1960s, gold deposits were detected off the shores of Alaska. Preliminary sea-mining for gold became one of the most important components of Operation Goldfinger, and one with which the public could be productively engaged without creating a stir. Not that it was easy; commandeering government ships during the Vietnam War to become twentieth-century Argos was a challenge. At the very start of Goldfinger, Treasury tried to get one from the Coast Guard but was rebuffed.29 Instead, the USGS contracted with the University of Oregon in 1967 to launch the Yaquina, a 180-foot-long, 900-ton research vessel, designed to dredge sediment beneath the continental shelf between Coos Bay in Oregon and Eureka in northern California.30 The project, however, found miniscule amounts of gold.
Operation Goldfinger’s ambitions did not stop at US shores. Officials at Treasury and the Geological Survey were excited about a “very promising gold prospect” along the Puruni River in north-central Guyana. In the early part of the twentieth century, a mine there had produced some 40,000 ounces of gold but had been abandoned since 1916. A Geological Survey scientist conducting a study for the Agency for International Development found that some of the mine’s veins contained “several ounces of gold per ton . . . they are large and gold-bearing to depths of at least 700 feet.” Guyana’s regional rival Venezuela also held out hope. This was a pet project for a veteran administration outside adviser with an eccentric bent—Alexander Sachs, who had been an adviser to FDR and was for decades the chief economist at the Wall Street firm Lehman Brothers. Sachs, who was by now in his 70s and lived in Manhattan, had for years been almost a one-man Operation Goldfinger. At least since the early 1960s, Sachs gathered information and contacts in the mining and technology worlds and bombarded Treasury and Federal Reserve officials with elaborate plans to tap the gold resources of Guyana, Venezuela, South Africa, and beyond.
Most administration officials who received Sachs’s lengthy, dense memoranda did not consider themselves expert enough to endorse his often utopian plans. Nonetheless, Sachs managed to convince Johnson’s highest-level advisers to pursue his ideas. Both Treasury Secretary Fowler and Eugene Rostow, the State Department’s undersecretary of political affairs, felt Sachs’s proposals were too good to pass up. “I have no way of knowing whether the area of Venezuela under discussion is as promising as Mr. Sachs suspects it to be,” Rostow wrote. “But there is evidence of high promise to justify a full feasibility study. . . . I suggest a Public Corporation or Authority established by a Treaty between Venezuela and the United States.”31
Rostow’s suggestion of international cooperation was all the more remarkable because Sachs recommended not merely traditional gold mining, but prying gold out of the Venezuelan ground using nuclear detonations. During the 1960s, many such experiments with underground nuclear explosions were proposed—and some carried out—primarily for mining, drilling, and land-moving purposes, under the auspices of Project Plowshare, a program for the peaceful use of nuclear technology. Plowshare was a particular passion for hydrogen-bomb pioneer Edward Teller, with whom Hornig had worked at Los Alamos Laboratory during the Manhattan Project’s construction of the atomic bombs. Teller advocated nonmilitary applications of nuclear energy both for their own remarkable technical achievements and as propaganda, to soften public opposition to nuclear power, which had begun to arise in the late 1950s (some maintain that Plowshare was deliberately designed to woo public opinion and postpone a nuclear moratorium).32 In a 1960 article for Popular Mechanics Teller asserted that “the dangers from fallout in the weapons-testing program have been greatly exaggerated” and advocated nuclear detonations to acquire oil and to quickly build harbors in places such as Point Hope in northern Alaska.33 From Plowshare’s inception in 1957 to its eventual demise two decades later, dozens of nonmilitary atomic explosions were planned and many were carried out. In July 1962, the then-largest nuclear explosion ever to take place in North America occurred in the Nevada desert. The detonation of a 100-kiloton device moved some twelve million tons of earth and created a crater as deep as a football field and four times as wide. The experiment had no immediate practical application, but many scientists interpreted it as verification for their projections about the size and scope of a blast needed for nuclear-aided land-moving. The projections for negligible radioactive fallout were less accurate. As part of the project, thirty beagles were placed in wire cages at distances between 12 and 40 mi
les from the blast’s ground zero, with their mouths taped shut, to test the power of an inhaled radioactive dose. Within 72 hours of the explosion, ten of the dogs died.34
The goal of harnessing such massive explosions to mineral mining had not occurred to Alexander Sachs alone. The idea existed in embryonic form years before Goldfinger was hatched, as a way of compensating for the dramatic postwar decline in US copper production. In the late 1950s, the Utah-based Kennecott Copper Corporation purchased a massive, low-grade copper deposit near Safford, Arizona.35 The company’s test drilling indicated that beneath a slab of volcanic rock 500 feet thick lay a 2-billion-ton reserve of ore containing 0.4 percent copper. But the ore could not be reached using conventional explosives, and so Kennecott considered using nuclear explosives to mine it. This could of course not be done without government cooperation, and Kennecott began discussions about such explosions with the AEC in 1963 (other companies involved in mining, including Anaconda and Dow Chemical, made similar queries). By 1965, a feasibility study by Kennecott, the AEC, and the Bureau of Mines was approved, and dubbed Project Sloop. The idea was to explode a 20-kiloton nuclear device 1,200 feet below the ground, then leach the copper out with sulfuric acid. Sloop’s projected cost, to be shared between the federal government and Kennecott, was $13 million. Initially these plans were developed secretly, although in October 1967, the AEC held a public meting in Arizona to try and sell the idea to somewhat skeptical residents.
Project Sloop began to generate attention in mining trade journals, local Arizona newspapers, and even Time magazine, which led to major obstacles for Kennecott. The second half of 1967 was the most turbulent time in the global copper business since World War II; the Bureau of Mines dubbed it “the year of the strike.” In the middle of the year, a large number of copper-mining labor contracts in the United States expired, and the two major unions representing tens of thousands of miners demanded company-wide negotiations with company-wide contracts, thereby greatly expanding the number of mines that would be represented by unions. The industry adamantly resisted, and by midsummer, strikes were rampant across the country and would go on for months; in September, only one copper-smelting facility was operating in the country, representing less than 2 percent of US capacity.36 Kennecott was one of the strike’s biggest targets, and union leaders saw Sloop as an opportunity to argue that using publicly owned nuclear technology to line the coffers of a single private company was wrong.
The Sloop project took on an entirely new dimension when, in early 1968, a member of Congress went public with Sloop details he said he’d obtained from Livermore. Craig Hosmer was a California Republican who served two decades in the House and later became the head of a nuclear industry trade group. Hosmer was almost certainly the most ardent government advocate of the Plowshare program; he continually and unsuccessfully introduced legislation to share Plowshare technology with private companies. He also believed that most or all of the Johnson administration was, in conjunction with various liberal allies, deliberately impeding Plowshare’s progress. Denouncing the Budget Bureau, the State Department, and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Hosmer charged that “these people seem to have a paranoiac distrust and abhorrence for Plowshare, which they cannot divorce in their minds from the weapons program.”37
Given these views, it is unlikely that Hosmer gave the administration advance notice when he revealed that, true to Operation Goldfinger form, Project Sloop’s copper-mining goal was partly a cover story for a plan to find gold. “Some of these Plowshare people have begun to seriously investigate the prospect of recovering gold ore in a manner similar to that already studied for recovering another metal currently in short supply, copper.” And the early results were good; the AEC had found no technical barriers, according to Hosmer. “It may be possible that gold can be produced in the United States, domestically for less than $10 per ounce, perhaps considerably less . . . not in the 21st century or beyond, but within a decade or less,” Hosmer declared, ironically echoing the Goldfinger enthusiasm expressed two years earlier by his Johnson White House foes.38
Initially, Hosmer’s bombshell got no more notice than the dozens of congressional soliloquies that occur daily. But a week later, the New York Times published a business-section story headlined “A-Blasts Studied as Way to Expand U.S. Gold Output,” and that got attention in Washington and Livermore. Immediately, an AEC official sent a telex to Livermore indicating that all work involving atomic gold mining should be coordinated with the Bureau of Mines; if Sloop hadn’t begun life as an Operation Goldfinger effort, it was about to become one. There were, nonetheless, some tricky questions. One concerned the details of the “in situ” leaching process to bring the gold to the surface; another was whether irradiation would render the gold unusable. After all, a study of Project Sloop’s copper application predicted that the resulting metal would be contaminated with ruthenium-106; given that isotope’s half-life of one year, the copper would not be suitable for many industrial uses, such as medical equipment. Moreover, since copper is frequently recycled, a government report warned that “slightly radioactive copper will be dispersed into the copper supply of the nation.”39
A close cousin to the idea of surfacing gold with nuclear detonations was the proposal to create gold using subatomic reactions—another passion of Alexander Sachs. Sachs had assembled a coterie of interested parties and freelance scientists who were keen to get access to government technology to perform the ultimate alchemical experiments: using nuclear energy to turn base metals into gold. And he managed to convince the US treasury secretary to take up his cause. Fowler wrote to both Udall and Atomic Energy Commission chief Glenn Seaborg, touting “well-worked-out and ingenious ideas [Sachs] has advanced concerning the potentiality for extraction of metals by means of nuclear devices.” He continued: “Because of the implications of Dr. Sachs’s proposal for, among other things, the present vexed international monetary situation, I am extremely anxious that [an] assessment be made—and in the swiftest possible time.”40
The science being advocated was technically sound. For hundreds of years alchemists suspected that other metals were structurally close enough to gold to be transformed into it, using some elusive external process. Many scientists recognized that the nuclear age had in theory provided the tools. In a 1968 letter that tried to discourage this line of experimentation, Seaborg nonetheless acknowledged “other elements near gold in the periodic table can indeed be transmuted into gold by nuclear reactions.” This could be done either in a nuclear reactor or in a particle accelerator. Seaborg himself, in 1980, took part in an experiment at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that created gold almost as a side effect. He and colleagues bombarded foil made from bismuth with high-speed beams containing the nuclei of carbon and neon. Several neutrons were thereby stripped from the bismuth, and the result contained billions of atoms of different gold isotopes. As with so many of Operation Goldfinger’s discoveries, however, the problem was the extreme limitation of the atomic scale. Seaborg summed up the problem in a press interview: “It would cost more than one quadrillion dollars per ounce to produce gold by this experiment.”41 The opinions of more sober-minded scientists in and around the Johnson administration prevailed; despite Treasury’s eagerness for a subatomic solution to the gold shortage, these proposals were never put into action.
What became of Operation Goldfinger? Most aspects of Goldfinger were kept out of the public and even congressional spotlight, and those that were revealed were rarely presented as part of a broad experimental push for gold. Thus, the decline of the project was similarly piecemeal and opaque. Most of the initial experiments were one-offs and were not funded again after results came in. Individual areas of interest—such as the reopening of a viable gold mine in Cortez, Nevada—showed some success. Other projects were directionally valid over the long term; Guyana and Venezuela, for example, produce substantially more gold today than when Operation Goldfinger was eying them in the late 1960s (although
neither is a world leader, and both use no more than conventional explosions to produce gold).
The plans to use nuclear detonation for gold mining never became reality. The original copper rationale for Project Sloop was unable to demonstrate its commercial viability, even with private-sector cooperation. By the early 1970s, most government scientists had scaled back their attempts to use nuclear detonations for earthmoving or mining; opposition from activist scientists and the general population became pronounced, particularly as details of radioactive fallout were made public. Of particular concern was a 1973 test in Rio Blanco, Colorado, in which a nuclear explosion was designed to stimulate natural gas production. A pipe carrying radioactive water to a disposal well sprang a leak, and the Environmental Protection Agency found gas samples from the project with one thousand times the normal background level of radioactivity. A few years later, Colorado voters amended the state constitution to prohibit any nuclear explosions in the state without prior voter approval.42 Plowshare itself limped along until the Department of Energy was founded in 1977, after which it was defunded.
How seriously did the Johnson administration view Operation Goldfinger, and how seriously should subsequent generations view it? Alas, most of the main participants were deceased by the turn of the twenty-first century. Asked in 2014 for his view of Operation Goldfinger, Francis Bator, an economist who worked in the Johnson administration and closely advised the president on international monetary policy, implied that most of his colleagues did not believe it would ever be a serious solution to the monetary gold shortage. “It was a gimmick. It was a sideshow,” he recalled.43 At best, Bator said, Operation Goldfinger was designed as a show of force, a psychological attempt to ease world markets by hinting that the United States could tap new sources of gold if need be. These efforts might serve to buy some time while the economists and diplomats in the administration could find a palatable way to decouple the dollar from gold. Bator has a point: by 1968, Operation Goldfinger had indeed acquired a propagandistic aspect. For example, the Bureau of Mines made a public announcement in March 1968 about a “major technical breakthrough” that would dramatically increase the amount of gold produced in the United States. The technique, an aqueous chemical treatment allowing more gold to be extracted from carbonaceous ores, was certainly promising, but had only been executed in a Reno research lab. Under the best of circumstances it was years away from any commercial impact.44
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