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Notes -
Radiation doesn't work that way.
Some stuff is radioactive; it emits (ionising) radiation. Exposing stuff to radiation is called "irradiating" it. Stuff that is irradiated does not itself become radioactive, with one exception I'll come back to. This is why people do things like irradiating drinking water and food to kill germs; the water/food is unchanged afterward except that all the germs are dead, and certainly isn't radioactive.
So, irradiating the steel would maybe damage the steel (which would be detectable), but the steel wouldn't then be emitting radiation. If you want steel that emits radiation, you have to mix radioactive stuff into it (ideally isotopes of the same elements the steel's supposed to be composed of; if you put plutonium in it or something, they might notice that your steel has plutonium in it when it shouldn't). And then that radioactive steel will irradiate the port, but that won't make the port radioactive; it might be detectable (though not necessarily from very far away), and it might hurt people working on the ship, but the port won't have some trace there unless the steel is corroding (which would also be detectable).
(I feel I should note that if you want data on US ship movements in peacetime, you don't need to go to this much trouble; ships other than submerged submarines are pretty easy to spot with spy satellites, and submerged submarines are radiation-shielded by the water so this plan won't work anyway. There's also the issue that because US ships usually are powered by nuclear reactors, some of the personnel will have radiation dosimeters, which will raise an alarm if the rest of the ship is radioactive for some reason.)
The exception is neutron radiation, which does cause things hit with it to become radioactive (though they don't generally then emit more neutron radiation; they emit beta and possibly gamma). The thing is, though, you generally need a lot of it to make something significantly radioactive - enough that it'll probably sicken people, because it's also highly dangerous to living beings. Sticking something in a nuclear reactor for a few days might make it noticeably radioactive, but sticking a person in a nuclear reactor for a few days (or a few minutes) will get you a corpse. Also, the only major sources of chronic neutron radiation are operating nuclear reactors and certain transplutonic elements (curium and californium) from spent nuclear fuel that undergo spontaneous fission; people will notice if you build an unshielded and undocumented nuclear reactor into a ship, and curium/californium have that issue where they are definitely not supposed to be in the steel so any chemical analysis (for e.g. QC purposes, or if it starts rusting strangely - they're both quite-reactive metals) will immediately turn up that "oh hey, some chucklehead mixed nuclear waste into the hull of our ship" (technically speaking, curium and californium are still viable fuel, but they're chucked out as waste in a lot of current reactors).
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