And this was the perfect argument against mounting torpedoes (especially heavy torpedoes) on any ship larger than a destroyer (in fact, on any ship larger than a Fleet Torpedo Boat). Sadly, pretty much nobody bothered to think about the risk-benefit balance of putting torpedo tubes on light cruisers and upwards.
To be fair, a lot of that had to do with the highly volatile nature of the oxygen used by the Type 93- I don't recall hearing about anything quite so spectacular ever happening on British, Italian, German, or French cruisers that had been hit in action.
The justifications for arming cruisers with torpedoes, according to the US Naval War College analysis on the subject, were that cruisers as scouting & heavy screening units could very well face a sudden, close-range encounter with enemy capital ships, carriers, or cruisers in bad weather or at night, where a snapshot torpedo launch could produce big results, and also in trade warfare (for dispatching captured enemy merchant ships). However, that analysis also found that given US tactical doctrine which concentrated ships into the main battlefleet and emphasized long-range daytime gunnery actions, US cruisers would have little opportunity to employ torpedoes, and made the unique decision to remove torpedoes from cruisers (except for the 2 classes that would work closely with destroyers, the
Omahas, & the
Atlantas (designed after the decison but partially intended as an
Omaha replacement), reasoning that with tight, treaty-limited designs, the space & weight could be better used on additional 5" AA guns. Interestingly, according to the data in Friedman's
US Cruisers & some springstyles once posted on the Naval Historical Center's website, the USN was planning on restoring torpedoes to cruisers in the abortive post-treaty generation of cruisers, that could be built as large as deemed necessary to provide the desired operational attributes, that were to have followed the
Clevelands &
Baltimores but for the demands of mobilization requiring concentraiton on those two designs.