Gold is very dense. 10 Tonnes of gold takes up less than a cubic meter of volume.
Moving tonnes of gold doesn’t look like huge pallets of gold with tarps over them like a James Bond movie. It looks like a handful of supply crates.
I imagine that the French Navy visits NY ports of a regular basis. Pretty normal for Navy’s to sail into the ports of allies during peace time. There would be nothing unusual about a French Navy vessel sailing into NY loading up with some supplies and leaving.
For a country like France it would be on the order of hundreds or a thousand tons. So that’s maybe on the order of hundred trips by delivery trucks at most. Yeah I suppose spread out over a few years it wouldn’t be noticed. At least not by the general public. But since the claim is that this triggered the collapse of the Bretton Woods system it would be documented and referenced a lot more, still.
Most delivery trucks (like a box truck) have capacities more like 10 or 20 tons. A heavy freight truck, like used to load ships? Even more.
You don’t generally just throw gold in a box truck… it typically moves by armored freight.
Maybe in some volumes, but I think most people would be shocked by the overall volume of gold that moves by UPS in small brown boxes.
The gold would be moved by cash-in-transit trucks which have relatively modest payload capacities of 5000-9000lbs today, a bit less in the 60s. 3 tons per truck is probably on the high end.
Was that the case in the 60s as well? I know trucks of that era had much lower capacity than today, even when comparing across class like "half-ton" trucks.
A half-ton truck is a consumer pick-up truck, not a commercial shipping vehicle. Much much smaller.
Yup that's what I had in mind, a 60s city delivery truck, not a semi, so googled that and came up to about 10t.
The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 set the gross vehicle weight limit for trucks at 73,280lbs. I imagine trucks of the day probably at least came close to that limit?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_trucking_indust...