The marginal differences in labor and environmental costs are not small at all even when it is strategically important. During the Cold War when this was last an immediate issue the National Defense Stockpile had to act as a subsidy program to keep dozens of unprofitable smelting operations in the Gulf Coast, the Tennessee River Valley and the Columbia Valley afloat against competition from Scandinavia and East Asia because of these costs but this only created the new problem of what to do with the NDS, a controversial operation from the beginning.

JFK criticised it again and again and put forward investigations with the aim of scrapping it. Nixon and Carter tried to scrap it only to face concerns about which senatorial districts would be harmed by months of flooding commodities markets. Reagan passed an act to mandate its liquidation and died years later before any sales had begun. All of these were accompanied by weeks of Congressional fighting that dominated the papers.