The Cod Wars
Dan Snow's History Hit
History Hit
4.7 • 12.9K Ratings
🗓️ 16 December 2024
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the long and lamentable history of human conflicts, the Cod Wars have to be among the most bizarre. And what was the catalyst for them? You guessed it - fish. These 20th-century confrontations pitted hardy British fishermen and ships of the Royal Navy against the unwavering Icelandic Coast Guard. They involved medieval inventions and tactics like ships ramming each other, and even live fire. The conflict would shake the very foundations of NATO, and threaten to upend the balance of power in the Cold War between East and West.
William Reynolds is a Lecturer in Defence Studies at King's College London and joins us to explain these bizarre confrontations that came to shape maritime law and British-Icelandic relations.
Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Max Carrey.
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Transcript
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| 0:24.6 | Hi folks, this episode is sponsored by The World, specifically The World podcast, with Richard |
| 0:31.9 | Engel and Yalda Hakim from Sky News. The World is a new World Affairs podcast, hosted by NBC's chief foreign correspondent |
| 0:41.4 | and Sky's lead world news presenter. Every week, Richard and Yaldo are going to have decades |
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| 0:51.9 | and why it matters. They cover conflict, democracy, and the most |
| 0:56.8 | urgent questions in geopolitics from the front lines, wherever in the world they are playing out. |
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| 1:07.1 | and in war, conflict and diplomacy, then this podcast for you. |
| 1:11.3 | And frankly, we should all be interested in those things. |
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| 1:23.6 | Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's history hit. |
| 1:25.9 | I have a strange fascination with some of the more |
| 1:28.8 | bizarre conflicts. In the long and lamentable catalogue of human conflict, there are certain episodes |
| 1:35.3 | amidst the horror and the tragedy that do raise a little bit of an eyebrow, maybe even a smile. |
| 1:42.0 | The bizarre conflicts, whether it's the Soccer War in Central America, |
| 1:46.2 | ignited by a World Cup qualifying soccer match, the Great Emu War of 1932, when the Australian |
| 1:52.7 | government undertook a military operation against large flightless birds. The Anglo-Zanzibar War was a very real war, a shooting war. It lasted about |
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