Yes, that's exactly the path I would choose. Not that I'm the target audience in my present day job but nothing is more irritating than having a production environment that subtly differs from the test environment at the language level.
I think it's more frustrating when production fails more often than the test environment than the other way around but I see your point. Main thing to consider obviously is that enabling the checks in the release code will degrade performance. Ultimately, overflow is a difficult problem to solve, I don't think there's a universal win that doesn't trade something off.