HMS Diana (D126): Sailed Close to a Nuclear Blast, Then Sank a Ship With Guns Alone

Constructed at Clydebank

HMS Diana was built by Yarrow and Company at Clydebank, yard number 1846, her keel laid on 3 April 1947, launched on 8 May 1952 by Lady McGrigor, and commissioned on 29 March 1954, a Daring-class destroyer that would go on to take part in two of the most historically distinctive episodes of any ship in this entire list.

Gathering Data From a Nuclear Blast

HMS Diana was assigned to Task Group 308.4 during Operation Mosaic, the British nuclear weapons test programme conducted near the Monte Bello Islands off Western Australia in 1956, tasked with carrying out scientific measurements and collecting radiological data from the detonations themselves.

For the first test, codenamed G1, detonated on 16 May 1956 with a yield of between 15 and 20 kilotons, HMS Diana was positioned approximately 9.7 kilometres, roughly six miles, from ground zero on Trimouille Island.

Following the blast, she was decontaminated and sailed for Singapore on 18 May, direct and deliberate exposure to a live nuclear test environment of a kind that would be almost unimaginable by later safety standards.

The wider British nuclear testing programme of this era has since become the subject of long-running concern and advocacy from veterans regarding possible long-term health effects of fallout exposure, and HMS Diana's crew are counted among the servicemen whose presence at these tests has drawn ongoing scrutiny and campaigning for recognition in the decades since.

Sinking the Domiat

HMS Diana's other defining moment came during the 1956 Suez Crisis, when on 31 October 1956 she sank the Egyptian frigate Domiat.

The action is sometimes cited as the last occasion on which one warship sank another purely through naval gunfire, without the assistance of missiles, torpedoes or aircraft, a notable historical distinction and a reminder that HMS Diana's career bridged two very different eras of naval warfare, the atomic and the resolutely traditional, within the space of just a few months.

Search and Rescue

In January 1968, HMS Diana took part in the search for the missing Israeli submarine Dakar, lost with all hands in the Mediterranean, and assisted the burning Spanish tanker MV Bahia Blanca, further variety in a career that had already ranged from nuclear science to gunnery combat.

A New Life as BAP Palacios

The Peruvian Navy acquired HMS Diana in 1969, renaming her BAP Palacios with hull number DM-73.

Following refits at Cammell Laird, she was commissioned into Peruvian service in April 1973, and remained in service until finally being stricken in 1993, closing out a notably extraordinary near four-decade career that had taken her from the radioactive aftermath of a British nuclear test to more than two further decades of active naval duty on the other side of the world.