Talk:HMS Sheffield (D80)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article falls within the scope of WikiProject Shipwrecks, an attempt to improve coverage of shipwreck-related topics. See also the parent WikiProject, WikiProject Disaster Management. If you plan to work on this article for an extended period of time, please indicate what you are doing on the Project's talk page.
NB: Assessment ratings and other indicators given below are used by the Project in prioritising and managing its workload.
???	This article has not yet been assigned a rating on the Project's quality scale.
???	This article has not yet been assigned a rating on the Project's importance scale.
Shipwreck-related priority open tasks: [edit] To Do Shipwrecks Clean up typos Improve Grammer Add any additions if needed Discuss disired additions Cattewater Wreck Needs expansion [edit] Done Shipwrecks Re-wrote the first paragraph Cleaned up Types of Shipwrecks it felt a bit jumbled Cattewater Wreck Started the article

It is said there were two nuclear warhead on-board when it sank. The Exocet missile that sunk the HMS Sheffield actually belonged to Venezuela´s arsenal. Venezuela gave the exocets to Argentina just few weeks before one of them managed to sink the Sheffield.

Uh-huh, so if there were two nuclear warheads on board, where's the cleanup crew? Beyond which, why would anyone put nuclear weapons on an Air Warfare Destroyer? The ship was designed to shoot down incoming planes, not to carry out nuclear attacks. About the exocets: Argentina was believed to have five exocets before the war, and fired four. So if the one that hit Sheffield was Venezuelan, what did they do with the unaccounted for missiles? Biscuit Knight 11:29, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

The reason that one might have been there is that the WE177 nuclear weapon was deployed on RN escorts as a nuclear depth bomb for helicopters. Apparently (WE177#Falklands_War) Broadsword, Brilliant, Coventry and Sheffield were carrying them when they sailed south but later had them removed. Emoscopes ^Talk 02:08, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Warhead Exploded

I'm writing in that the warhead exploded. The crew and members of the Task Force believe the warhead exploded, I believe the Navy's official stance is that the exocet didn't explode, but there you are. If it didn't explode on impact, why didn't it explode due to extreme heat of the fire? Biscuit Knight 11:29, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Because modern explosives don't detonate when subjected to heat - they just burn. If you want a missile to detonate you have to use a detonator – real world explosives don't function quite like those depicted in cartoons which detonate when struck with a comedy mallet.

I don't think the issue is quite as closed as the article would try to make out. The Navy's official stance after experts have reviewed all of the available facts is certainly worthy of note; especially when the only evidence to the contrary that is discussed in the article is the personal belief of some of the servicemen present at the time.

Somehow I don’t think justice is done to the respective weight of each of those pieces of evidence. --62.173.76.218 17:22, 24 November 2006 (UTC)