In 1958 a country with no army and no navy told the most powerful fleet on earth to leave its fishing grounds — and then beat it, three separate times. The weapon was a hook on a piece of cable, but the real weapon was a runway in the middle of the North Atlantic.

This is the story of the Cod Wars: eighteen years of ramming, net-cutting and brinkmanship between Iceland and Britain, one death, and an outcome that quietly redrew the map of every ocean on the planet.

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CHAPTERS
0:00 The boat that came alongside
0:37 A country made of cod
2:55 Twelve miles, then fifty
6:47 The card Iceland was holding
8:50 What it cost Hull
10:40 Two hundred miles, everywhere

SOURCES
Every claim in this video traces to one of these. Where historians disagree or the evidence is thin, the narration says so.

Sverrir Steinsson, "The Cod Wars: a re-analysis," European Security 25:2 (2016)
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09662839.2016.1160376

Sverrir Steinsson, "Do liberal ties pacify? A study of the Cod Wars," Cooperation and Conflict 53:3 (2018)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0010836717712293

Guðni Th. Jóhannesson, "Troubled Waters: Cod War, Fishing Disputes, and Britain's Fight for the Freedom of the High Seas, 1948-1964," PhD thesis, Queen Mary, University of London (2004)
https://hi.academia.edu/Gu%C3%B0niThorlaciusJ%C3%B3hannesson

Imperial War Museums — "Cod Wars: Iceland, Britain and fishing rights"
https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-cod-wars-explained-the-conflict-between-iceland-and-britain

UK Parliament, House of Lords — "UNCLOS: the law of the sea in the 21st century"
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld5802/ldselect/ldintrel/159/15904.htm

Center for International Maritime Security — "The Cod Wars and Today"
https://cimsec.org/the-cod-wars-and-today-lessons-from-an-almost-war/

History@Kingston — "Fish Fights: the Icelandic Fisheries Dispute 1975-76"
https://historyatkingston.wordpress.com/2024/11/13/fish-fights-looking-back-on-the-icelandic-fisheries-dispute-1975-76/

Reykjavík Maritime Museum (ICGV Óðinn) and Maritime Hull (Arctic Corsair)
https://maritimehull.co.uk/projects/the-arctic-corsair

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