Argentina English

32 years ago Margaret Thatcher ordered the  sinking of the Argentinian cruiser General Belgrano.


She is the only ship ever to have been sunk during military operations by a nuclear-powered submarine[1] and the second sunk in action by any type of submarine since World War II, the first being the Indian frigate INS Khukri by the Pakistani Hangor during the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War.

"The cruiser General Belgrano I lived up to its motto:.. Go under before lowering the national flag The flag was the last I saw then on the raft on which I stood, my conscripts sang the national anthem with them spent 36 hours of survival, "said the commander of the ship, the captain of the ship Hector Bonzo, a few days of rescue.

The sinking of the cruiser General Belgrano, under the Falklands conflict, is considered by many as a war crime because the ship was attacked when he was outside the exclusion zone of 150 miles around the islands, which had been imposed unilaterally by the British.

Of the 1,093 crew of the ship, only 740 were rescued alive after spending almost three days in their rafts adrift in the icy waters of the South Atlantic.

"The wind was icy and giant waves. In the raft apretujábamos us against each other for warmth. We were fifteen in a closed, with some chocolates and blankets to cover ourselves orange boat when the wind chill was at least 20 degrees below zero "said Lt. Carlos corberta Bartolomé Castro Madero, a day to be modest.

That May 2, Margaret Thatcher ordered the English Defence Minister, John Nott, to convey to the English Admiralty directed the commander of the British nuclear submarine `Conqueror`, Commander Christhopher Wreford-Brown, torpedo and sink the cruise General Policy Belgrano.

Pursuant to that order, the 15.57 of the May 2, Wreford-Brown, a distance of about 1,400 yards, did fire two torpedoes MK-8, with a payload of 365 Kg-Torpex each against the cruise.

Ten minutes later, the commander of Cruise decided he could not do anything but give the order to abandon ship. 70 self-inflating rafts, which could hold twenty men each were then released. The orange roofs rafts seemed a collar surrounding the vessel to protect it.

An hour after being touched, the Belgrano turned and sank.

"The Belgrano was sunk in forty minutes. It was incredible, amazing that such a mass was absorbed by the water so quickly," said the sergeant first Silverio Muscardin nurse.

As a result of the attack and sinking 323 crew members, one cause of the explosions produced by torpedoes introducing into the helmet collided with explosives magazines, others by suffocation and drowning others died in the sinking.

The criminality of the sinking of the Belgrano was recognized even by the British, who accept that the decision to torpedo was more linked to a political issue than a military necessity, because the ship did not pose any danger.

The former British prime minister had ordered the sinking to hinder the peace negotiations, as the Argentina military junta seriously analyzed the acceptance of the proposal of the then Peruvian President Fernando Belaunde Terry.