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The Cod Wars
The British-Icelandic Cod Wars
were a series of confrontations of ramming vessels into each other
over a territorial dispute over fishing rights in the North Atlantic
where there's a lot of cod fish... and the British love cod fish n' chips,
(a dish introduced to the British from Spain.)
The Icelanders won the cod wars.
The Cod Wars (Icelandic: Ţorskastríđin, "the cod wars", or Landhelgisstríđin, "the wars for the territorial waters") were a series of confrontations between the United Kingdom and Iceland on fishing rights in the North Atlantic.
Each of the disputes ended with an Icelandic victory.
The Third Cod War concluded in 1976, with a highly favourable agreement for Iceland; the United Kingdom conceded to a 200-nautical-mile (370-kilometre) Icelandic exclusive fishery zone after threats that Iceland would withdraw from NATO, which would have forfeited NATO's access to most of the GIUK gap, a critical anti-submarine warfare chokepoint during the Cold War.
As a result, British fishing communities lost access to rich areas and were devastated, with thousands of jobs lost.
Since 1982, a 200-nautical-mile (370-kilometre) exclusive economic zone has been the United Nations standard.
The term "cod war" was coined by a British journalist in early September 1958. None of the Cod Wars met any of the common thresholds for a conventional war, and they may more accurately be described as militarised interstate disputes.
There is only one confirmed death during the Cod Wars: an Icelandic engineer, who was accidentally killed in the Second Cod War while he was repairing damage on the Icelandic gunboat Ćgir after a collision with the British frigate Apollo.
They collided again, on 29 August 1973.
Several explanations for the Cod Wars have been put forward. Recent studies have focused on the underlying economic, legal and strategic drivers for Iceland and the United Kingdom, as well as the domestic and international factors that contributed to the escalation of the dispute. Lessons drawn from the Cod Wars have been applied to international relations theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cod_Wars
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