[Spooky23]

It’s risk reduction.

That was an innovative plane and the reality is that nobody is going to wake up and build it again once production stops. Once you break up a team, the team is gone — that’s why we always build submarines, even if unnecessary. You have to keep the people and plant working.

That tooling was going to be compromised and useful to the Soviets or some other adversary. There is a well established record of traitors selling plans or materials to the KGB/FSB/Chinese intelligence that have been caught. Also, from a PR perspective, a headline like “Air Force spends $50M/year to guard stealth bomber tooling untouched in 30 years” isn’t great either.

[double0jimb0]

This was talking about destroying the physical tooling. Ain’t nobody sneaking 60,000 tools out the back door to the Soviets. Many/most of those tools are going to weigh many tons, would require rigging to lift and flatbeds to move. Could they easily sneak out tooling drawings and schematics? yes probably could and did. But not the physical tools themselves.

[jn1234]

It was also keeping the manufacturing process and technologies, specifically stealth secret.