...and destroy the tooling.
What's the reason for this? Seems you can plunk it down in the desert somewhere and just sit on it.
It seems like it would have been wise to keep enough of the production capabilities to where in a pinch production could have began without having to rebuild all the necessary machinery, molding, etc, to start production again. I don't know why it was done.
We are loosing our in house defense industries and capabilities at an alarming rate. For example only one shipyard remains which can produce even a conventional powered aircraft carrier. The remaining shipbuilder is across the river from the only major east coast carrier repair yard as well. We went from 4 to 1 although I think two of the four never actually produced a carrier.