In the Royal Navy, the problem was the lack of a real general staff to oversee supply, dispositions, tactics, ship construction/design - the high ranking people who know what they're doing, in charge of making sure everything is done safely, properly, and RIGHT.
But I digress. In space, a nuclear blast is not that scary. Heck, it's not that scary (to warships) in-atmosphere. Look at the Bikini Atoll tests.
The heavy cruiser Pensacola (light cruiser boosted a rating due to 8" armament), the old
Wyoming-class battleship
Arkansas, and the battleship
Nagato were within a half-mile of the detonation radius. Their upperworks (bridge and such) suffered due to the shockwave and heat, but their hulls and turrets were virtually unharmed. As with other ships, the radiation was the chief concern. Ask the firefighters who died at Chernobyl; that's a pretty immediate concern, they began to die hours after they responded.
However, given a better blast medium, the second test on Baker Day resulted in what must have been an unforgettable sight.
Detonated 300 ft beneath the waves, under a landing vessel, the blast lifted the 26,000-ton
Arkansas on a column of water hundreds of feet high, and a globe of radioactive, heated water was launched into the sky. The
Nagato and
Pensacola sank some time after the blast; the
Arkansas came down from the column and went to the bottom of the lagoon.
So the main danger is the shockwave; radiation is a major concern but for at least a couple of hours the mortally irradiated crewers can continue fighting, even though there is no current way to reverse major radiation damage.
However, we here do not have nukes, so this was all off-topic. But it was fun; I love this kind of history-scifi-sciencey stuff if you didn't realize that by my long-winded rambling on obscure things.
