The economics of SPECTRE in YOLT

chrisisall

The covert hollowing out of a dormant volcano in Japan is no mean feat, to say nothing of the construction and implementation of a working, aggressive space project therein.
I estimate nearly a decade of design & construction, and 100 billion dollars (in 60's $'s, a quarter being hush money/follow-up assassination fees for potential whistle-blowers)...
...somehow, I just don't get what kind of return they were expecting for that monetary investment & supreme level of discretionary difficulty...
Ooops! Thinking too much again!

Golrush007

An interesting thought to ponder, but definitely thinking too much!

This level of improbability is one of the reasons that YOLT ranks fairly low for me. It's fun, but I really like my Bond to be a bit more believable. The balance between reality and fantasy is missing. Still, it did result in one of the most incredible movie sets ever created! Luckily for UA it didn't cost 100 billion dollars to build the set!

Colonel Shatner

Similarily, how did Alec Trevelyan establish the Janus facility in Cuba which was also elaborate and massive, and also staffed with a army of guards and technicians?

Since the Janus syndicate seemed to be based around Trevelyan being in cahoots with a rapacious and crooked Russian general (who had a lot of fingers in Soviet black-ops projects) the Janus complex was presumably a twin Soviet control facility to Severnyana, construction began in the mid to late 1980s but the statistical MI6 analysis of the GoldenEye project proved partially correct: the funding ran out as the Soviet system crumbled (the last of the funding blown when the second satellite was launched into orbit), the second GoldenEye command facility was only partially built, and mothballed (and forgotten by Russian officials not in Trevelyan's back pocket). Around half a decade later the Janus syndicate amassed a fortune after supplying many regimes throughout Eurasia, and used these funds to complete and re-occupy the second GoldenEye command facility in Cuba, making it fully operational.

The Janus personnel in Cuba were mercenaries hired directly from Orumov's military and electronic warfare units under his jurisdiction, and were ruthless men and women who held a grudge against the West for the fall of the Soviet system just four years before, and given a chance by Alec Trevelyan to seriously cripple a Western country and get wealthy in the process (the Janus conspiracy, through Orumov, had also gotten to many crooked men serving at the GRU archive facility in St. Petersberg and had no real loyalty to out of touch functionaries like Mishkin).

chrisisall

That's pretty well thought out, Colonel!! B-)

Colonel Shatner

Also Eliot Carver seemed to get a lot of his illicit military resources through Eurasian arms trading and by co-operating with a very high ranking PLA officer who was as comparably ambitious and corrupt as Orumov (General Chang; he was as important as Orumov but got much less screentime and was more of a third party facilitator than a de facto No. 2 in the main bad guy's outfit).

chrisisall

Consider them all slimed.

Colonel Shatner

With the SPECTRE volcano base on that Japanese island I imagine that SPECTRE (through Osato Chemical Co. and a few other shell companies) bore through the side of the extinct volcano, into the flooded crater, then slowly drained it away (while covering the mouth of the crater with a dummy lake surface similar to the retractable one that replaced it). That makes sense and makes construction of the massive facility fairly discreet.

The rocket launches happened almost in sight of the island villagers; that always bothered me (even though they seemed a superstitious and isolated bunch).