HMS Sheffield

Aluminum superstructure caught fire after Exocet hit; charge didn't detonate. Example of why US tried to move from aluminum to waffle steel superstructure.

During the Star Wars buildup in the mid 80s, there was lots of money for lots of things. The US Navy at White Oak, Maryland, was developing — spent a quarter billion dollars developing — a particle beam weapon. This was to be a relativistic electron beam, millions of electron volts, that if there was a cruise missile or an Exocet missile coming in to attack the ship, this was to take it out. This was after the Falklands War, when the French Exocet missile hit the British destroyer HMS Sheffield and destroyed the ship. The reason it destroyed the ship had nothing to do with the explosive charge of the Exocet or setting off the charges. It was the fact that the ship had an aluminum superstructure, and the superstructure caught on fire. You can't put out the fire, and the whole thing burned.

Galvanic-corrosion theory of why the aluminum superstructure of the Sheffield burned after the Exocet hit. Connects to the steel-aluminum transition joint case (§4.p1). Tom flags this as a disputed theory.

The only problem is you've now put a galvanic couple of aluminum and iron into a seawater environment, and it corrodes just great. There are theories — there are disputes about this — but I told you about the Exocet missile that hit the Sheffield. This was before most of you were born, but those of us living in the early '80s remember. The Argentinians decided to take over the Falkland Islands, which are off the coast of South America, off the coast of Argentina. Argentina claims them, but the British have had them from when the British Empire ruled the world and the sun never set on it. They call them the Falklands, which is a Scottish name, and the Argentinians call them something else. In the early '80s the Argentinians decided that Britain was now a third-world country, so far away they couldn't fight a war in the Argentinians' backyard. They invaded the Falklands. This is sort of the same thing going on now between China and Japan over little islands — these things get to be important because underneath them you have oil deposits.

Falkland Islands War — Exocet missile strike; debate over whether aluminum superstructure fire was the cause. Navy operationally believed it was, evidenced by mid-80s waffle-steel superstructure replacement program for surface ships.

The joke at the time was, a gallon of jet fuel could wipe out any ship in the fleet. Of course they knew about that because of the Sheffield. I've had several people in this class do presentations on the Falcon [Falkland] Islands war and how the British cruiser Sheffield got hit by an Exocet missile, and people say the aluminum superstructure caught fire. There are other things now you can find on the web that say that wasn't the cause of the fire on the Sheffield, it wasn't the Exocet missile — whether it was or not, it's still a debate. I've asked some of my friends at Carderock and they'll tell me there's some debate about it. But let me tell you, the Navy believed it was the aluminum catching fire, because by the mid-80s they were trying to replace the superstructures in surface ships from aluminum to waffle membrane steel, high-strength low-alloy steel. They were making a waffle composite of steel to get rid of the aluminum. Well, why were they spending all that money if they didn't think the aluminum would catch fire?

A single Argentinian-fired French Exocet missile started an aluminum fire that wiped out a British capital ship. Used to motivate US Navy particle-beam weapon development.

In the early 90s, the military had spent a quarter billion dollars developing particle-beam weapons — proton beams the Navy was supposedly going to shoot through the air to shoot down a missile coming toward the ship. In the Falkland Islands War in the 80s, a French Exocet missile fired by the Argentinians hit the British cruiser Sheffield, and an aluminum fire started. There's debate on whether it was an aluminum fire, but it probably was, and it wiped out the entire ship. One small missile that you could buy from arms dealers anywhere in the world could wipe out a capital ship of one of the world's major navies. So the US Navy was trying to develop these particle-beam weapons from the mid-80s through the early 90s, and then peace broke out with the former Soviet Union. They weren't quite as concerned anymore, but they had spent a quarter billion dollars and they wanted to find some application. They had a three-day workshop, invited me to it, and said, "Can we use these to weld nuclear submarines?" I went down and said, "Well, maybe you can melt a nuclear submarine, but with 5 megawatts of power, you don't need that to weld. You only need a few tens of kilowatts."

Cited as another perennial student-paper topic. Tom summarizes the standard account (Exocet missile, aluminum superstructure fire) and notes the cause "is still debated" — pointing students toward forming their own theory rather than repeating the narrative.

I would like you to tell me something about what you think. I teach these Navy students during the summer, and I don't know how many times I've had the Thresher disaster or the British carrier the Sheffield in the Falkland Islands war, and the variations on those themes. The Thresher disaster — the submarine sank off Cape Cod, which was a major catharsis for the US Navy. They basically shut down submarine production for three years, and the Navy instituted a new program which they called SUBSAFE, which actually is the beginning of total quality management. The Navy did it in the 60s, American industry picked it up in the 90s, the Japanese picked it up in the 60s, 70s and 80s. But it was actually developed because of the Thresher disaster. The Sheffield got hit by an Exocet missile in the Argentine-British war over the Falkland Islands, and this one little missile destroyed the whole ship because the aluminum superstructure caught fire and just became a great big flare.