ARA General Belgrano

ARA General Belgrano (C-4) was an Argentine Navy light cruiser in service from 1951 until 1982. Originally commissioned by the U.S. Navy as USS Phoenix, she saw action in the Pacific theatre of World War II before being sold to Argentina. The vessel was the second to have been named after the Argentine founding father Manuel Belgrano (1770–1820). The first vessel was a 7,069-ton armoured cruiser completed in 1896.

She was sunk on 2 May 1982 during the Falklands War by the Royal Navy submarine Conqueror with the loss of 323 lives. Losses from General Belgrano totalled just under half of Argentine military deaths in the war.

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

The warship was built as USS Phoenix, the sixth ship of the Brooklyn-class cruiser design, in Camden, New Jersey, by the New York Shipbuilding Corporation starting in 1935, and launched in March 1938. She survived the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 undamaged, and went on to earn nine battle stars for World War II service. At the end of the war, she was placed in reserve at Philadelphia on 28 February 1946, decommissioned on 3 July that year and remained laid up at Philadelphia.

Phoenix was sold to Argentina in October 1951 and renamed 17 de Octubre after the "Loyalty day", an important symbolic date for the political party of president Juan Perón. Sold with her was another of her class, the USS Boise, renamed ARA Nueve de Julio, which was withdrawn in 1977.

17 de Octubre was one of the main naval units that joined the 1955 coup which overthrew Perón, and was afterwards renamed General Belgrano after Manuel Belgrano, a lawyer who had founded the Escuela de Náutica (School of Navigation) in 1799 and with the rank of general fought for Argentine independence from 1811 to 1819. General Belgrano accidentally rammed her sister ship Nueve de Julio on exercises in 1956, causing damage to both. General Belgrano was outfitted with the Sea Cat anti-aircraft missile system between 1967 and 1968.

On 12 April 1982, following the 1982 invasion of the Falkland Islands, the United Kingdom declared a 200-nautical-mile (370 km) Maritime Exclusion Zone (MEZ) around the Falkland Islands within which any Argentine warship or naval auxiliary entering the MEZ might be attacked by British forces. On 23 April, the British Government clarified in a message that was passed via the Swiss Embassy in Buenos Aires to the Argentine government that any Argentine ship or aircraft that was considered to pose a threat to British forces would be attacked.

On 30 April this was upgraded to the total exclusion zone, within which any sea vessel or aircraft from any country entering the zone might be fired upon without further warning. The zone was stated to be "...without prejudice to the right of the United Kingdom to take whatever additional measures may be needed in exercise of its right of self-defence, under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter." The concept of a total exclusion zone was a novelty in maritime law; the Law of the Sea Convention had no provision for such an instrument. Its purpose seems to have been to increase the time available to ascertain whether any vessel in the zone was hostile or not. Regardless of the uncertainty of the zone's legal status, it was widely respected by the shipping of neutral nations.