Fort Knox Security Theater

Michael O'Malley:

In speeches explaining the change, Roosevelt paradoxically stressed the importance of gold reserves.“By making clear that we are establishing permanent metallic reserves in the possession and ownership of the federal government,” he told Congress in 1934, “we can organize a currency system which is both sound and adequate.” But the U.S. already had “metallic reserves” -- the act had actually eliminated that gold’s legal function.
Roosevelt turned to Fort Knox, which had been an Army base since 1918 and was used in the 1930s primarily as a training site for mechanized cavalry. Putting the U.S. Bullion Depository at Fort Knox amounted to a kind of psychic compensation.
No one at the Treasury Department or the Federal Reserve was asking for a new vault. The Treasury’s gold had been stored at mints in San Francisco, Philadelphia and Denver, and in the assay office in New York. Lack of space could have been the reason: The country’s stock of gold tripled from 1933 to 1936. But it doesn’t take much space to store gold. John Maynard Keynes famously calculated that all the gold in the world would fit easily in the cargo hold of an ocean liner. The Federal Reserve banks probably offered more than adequate physical space, and safety, for gold deposits. But creating and publicizing a new fortress offered a kind of “security theater.”
The government made a great show of moving its bullion to Kentucky after the gold vault was completed in 1936. “Fifty armored trains to carry Federal gold,” announced the New York Times. Soldiers and Treasury agents with submachine guns rode with the gold as it moved by rails along a secret route. “Dummy” trains decoyed would-be thieves. Tanks and infantry protected armored transports as they drove the bricks from railhead to vault.

Isn't gold itself monetary security theater?  Does anyone really think they will be able to utilize gold as a currency?  It is just a dumb idea.