Quote: "The United States Bullion Depository holds 4,603 tons (4,176 metric tons) of gold bullion."
Now lets put that into perspective shall we?
The M-1A2 Abrams which was about the best US tank available at the time has a dry weight of 62.1 tonnes.
4,176 divided by 62.1 equals 67.25 tanks.
The C-5 can carry 122,470 kilograms, or 122.47 tonnes. This is just less than two tanks.
So, basically we need 34 flights by a C-5 Galaxy to shift all the gold, and that's gold only, doesn't include any passengers, security, additional equipment, etc. To do the job right we're looking at about 40 flights.
Ok, so still doable.... Lets look at fuel. Presuming you're travelling only halfway across the country and back, that's about one load of fuel - 193,600 litres.
40 flights of say 190,000 litres and you're looking at 7.6 million litres of aviation fuel. This is approximately 8 months of Ploesti's post war production rate - the 2000 Pact counteroffensive only had one month's worth to play with.
Given that the US government did not split until mid 1998 well after the November 1997 nuclear strikes, I have great difficulty in believing that much fuel would be available.
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