The Cod Wars: The Navy Defeated by a Net Cutter

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One country does not own a single warship; all it has is a few coast guard boats and a steel cutter towed behind them. Facing it is one of the most powerful navies in the world. Eighteen years later the side that walks away from the table will be Iceland, and today the sea borders of the entire world run along the line it drew.

Picture an island sitting in the middle of the North Atlantic, in the cold emptiness between Greenland and Scotland. Its surface area is that of a mid-sized European country, but most of its land is glacier, lava field and barren highland. There are almost no trees. Grain will not grow. Beneath the ground there is no coal, no iron, no oil. In the middle of the nineteen seventies, the number of people living on this island is roughly two hundred and twenty thousand — the population of a medium-sized district, and it has built itself a state, with its own flag, its own parliament and its own foreign ministry.

The only thing Iceland possessed was the water around it. And that water carried one of the most fertile fishing grounds on earth. The cold current descending from the north met the warm Atlantic water coming up from the south over the shallow continental shelf that rings the island; that meeting set off an explosion of plankton, the plankton fed the small fish, and the small fish fed the cod. The cod was the most patient hunter of cold water: slow-growing, long-lived, white-fleshed, and suited to salting, drying and freezing. For centuries it carried the silent backbone of Europe's protein supply.

The entire Icelandic economy was built on that single item. From the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the nineteen seventies, fish and fish products made up eighty to ninety percent of the country's total exports. To put that plainly: between eighty and ninety percent of everything the country sold abroad. For an economy, that is an unthinkable fragility. In an industrial country, if one sector collapses, the others carry the weight. In Iceland there was no other sector to carry it. If the price of fish fell, wages fell; if the shoals thinned, the country could not service its debt. The most important document on a minister's desk in Reykjavik was not the budget — it was the catch statistics.

The problem was this: in law, those waters did not belong to Iceland. Until it declared full independence from Denmark in nineteen forty-four, the island was subject to the Danish crown and could not sign treaties in its own name. A convention signed between Denmark and Britain in nineteen oh one had drawn the fishing limit off Iceland's coasts at three miles. Three nautical miles — roughly five and a half kilometres. To the eye of a shepherd looking out from the shore, that is far short of the horizon. Everything beyond that line was open to everyone.

And beyond that line, a fleet was waiting. Britain's distant-water trawling fleet had been sending steam, and later diesel, trawlers to fish the Icelandic banks since the end of the nineteenth century. These vessels sailed from the ports of Hull, Grimsby and Fleetwood, stayed at sea for three weeks, filled their holds with ice and came home. In Hull, fishing was not a trade but an identity: a father taught his son how to mend a trawl net, in what weather the hatch had to be closed, what kind of wound a rope frozen in the Arctic Ocean opened in a man's hand. In certain neighbourhoods of the city, almost every house had a man at sea. These people were not going to Iceland as invaders; they were going where their fathers had gone, and the law stood behind them.

Both sides were right, and that is precisely why agreement was impossible. For the British fisherman, the Icelandic banks were a field that had been worked for three generations, and closing it was the theft of his livelihood. For the Icelander, those same waters were the country's only income, and every year the foreign trawlers came bigger, stronger and hungrier. In the nineteen fifties, when modern trawling technology combined with the sonar and radar developed during the war, catching fish turned into something else entirely. Finding the fish was no longer a matter of experience but of instruments. And the bottom trawl, sweeping the seabed, carried away not only the fish but the ground on which the fish bred.

Icelandic scientists began measuring the decline of the cod stock in the nineteen fifties. The figures said that everything in the sea was exhaustible. For the government in Reykjavik, this was not an environmental question. It was a question of existence. If the fish ended, the state ended. That sentence was not rhetorical exaggeration but arithmetic you could read straight off the budget table. And when a state truly believes its existence is under threat, it becomes ready to use every instrument it has. Iceland had no army. It had never had a navy. But it had something else: the bargaining power of a side with nothing left to lose.

In nineteen forty-nine, Iceland served notice that it was terminating the nineteen oh one convention. The agreement expired in nineteen fifty-one, and for the first time the island was in a position to draw the limits of its own waters. On the fifteenth of May, nineteen fifty-two, Reykjavik took the first step: the fishing limit was pushed out from three miles to four. The figure looks small. But the figure was never the real issue. With the same decision Iceland declared straight baselines — instead of tracing every indentation of the coast one by one, it joined the tips of its headlands with straight lines and declared the bays and fjords in between to be internal waters. So what looked on the map like an expansion of a single mile was, in practice, closing off the shallow bays where the trawlers fished most productively.

Britain's answer was not diplomatic but commercial. The trawler owners organized and blocked Icelandic fish from being landed in British ports. The embargo lasted four years and struck Iceland at its most vulnerable point: it had lost its biggest customer. But the result was the exact opposite of what London had calculated. Reykjavik found a new buyer, and that buyer was the Soviet Union. In the tensest years of the Cold War, the critical island on NATO's northern flank began selling its frozen cod to Moscow. For the Western alliance, this was the first sign that a quarrel over fish could open into a strategic fracture. The embargo was quietly relaxed in nineteen fifty-six, and Iceland had learned its lesson: it was not a country that could be pressured, because it had already diversified the market it stood to lose.

The real crisis came two years later. Iceland announced that from the first of September, nineteen fifty-eight, it was extending its fishing limit to twelve miles. That went far beyond what international law generally accepted at the time, and Britain declared that it would not recognize it. And it did not stop at declarations: it sent the Royal Navy to protect its trawler fleet. Over the period known as the First Cod War, fifty-three British warships served in Icelandic waters at one time or another. Destroyers, frigates, supply ships.

And on the other side? A handful of coast guard vessels, barely more than the fingers of one hand. These were not warships; they were patrol boats armed with one or two small guns and crewed by thirty or forty people. Next to a frigate they looked like a seal beside a whale. Britain gathered its trawlers into designated areas called boxes, the warships patrolled around those boxes, and the trawlers shot their nets under protection. The Icelandic Coast Guard, for its part, tried to come alongside any foreign trawler it could catch, put a boarding party aboard and tow the ship into port. Now and then warning shots were fired; now and then Icelandic officers climbed onto a trawler's deck only to be stranded there when a British warship closed in. For three years the tension climbed, but nobody died.

In the spring of nineteen sixty-one the two sides reached a settlement. Britain accepted that it would no longer contest Iceland's twelve-mile fishing zone. In return, a three-year transition was granted: in designated areas, in designated months, British trawlers could go on fishing. And a clause was written into the agreement; if Iceland should ever seek to extend its limits again and one of the parties objected, the matter would be taken to the International Court of Justice.

London saw that clause as a guarantee. There would be no more unilateral extension, and if there were, the law would step in. Reykjavik, reading the same clause, saw something different: twelve miles had been won. What has been won once can be won again. Because what really decided matters was not the legal text but the fact the decade had demonstrated; one of the greatest navies in the world had not been able to tear a handful of patrol boats out of the sea. Britain could protect its trawlers, but it could not make Iceland give up. Those two things were not the same thing. And Iceland had understood that the second one mattered more.

In an asymmetric struggle, the weaker side has to do something the stronger side cannot. The answer Iceland found was not a weapon. It was a tool — a kind of shears, in fact.

The idea belonged to the Coast Guard's commander, Pétur Sigurdsson; the design was worked out together with two craftsmen who knew their way around ironwork. The way it worked was startlingly simple. A heavy steel piece fitted with a hook was let out over the ship's stern on a long line and dragged along at a certain depth below the surface. The patrol vessel would pass astern of a fishing trawler, across the steel warps towing its net. The dragging hook would catch a warp, the taut steel would enter the jaws of the cutter, and it would part.

What a parted warp meant was this: the trawl net, its doors, its chain and the catch inside it all went to the sea floor. A set of trawl gear in those years was an investment of thousands of pounds, and a spare was not always carried aboard. A trawler that lost its net could not fish; a trawler that could not fish went home empty, after coming fifteen hundred miles, burning fuel and paying its crew. A single cut, a single movement of the hand, turned that voyage into a loss. Nobody was hurt, not a single shot was fired. But the ledger was riddled with holes.

The tool was first tried in nineteen fifty-eight, then shelved. Its stage was set in nineteen seventy-two. Iceland had announced that it was extending its fishing limit to fifty miles, effective the first of September, nineteen seventy-two. Britain and West Germany, relying on the nineteen sixty-one agreement, took the matter to the International Court of Justice; Iceland declared that it did not recognise the court's jurisdiction and did not even take part in the hearings. When the Court settled the case in nineteen seventy-four and ruled that the fifty-mile extension could not be invoked against the applicants, Reykjavik set the judgment aside without a flicker of concern. Events at sea had long since left the courtroom behind.

On the morning of the fifth of September, nineteen seventy-two, the coast guard vessel Ægir — Ayir — under the command of Captain Gudmundur Kjaernested, came upon a black-hulled trawler with its number painted over, working a bank off the north-east of the island. The time was twenty-five past ten. She was asked her name by radio; the trawler's skipper gave no answer. When the call was repeated, what came back over the radio was not a name but a piece of music: Rule, Britannia!, the tune long taken as the anthem of the Royal Navy. Fifteen minutes later, at twenty to eleven, the cutter went into the water for the first time. Ayir passed down the trawler's port side. Trailing some two hundred and ninety metres astern of the patrol vessel, the steel hook severed one of the trawl warps. The ship was identified afterwards from the radio traffic: the Peter Scott.

What followed was the same scene repeated for a year. Icelandic patrol vessels would drive in among trawlers drawn up in box formation, cut the warps with sharp turns of the helm, and then pull away. Everything a navy is designed for was useless here. You could not open fire, because the vessel facing you belonged to an allied country, and a single hit meant political catastrophe. You could not impose a blockade, because blockading Iceland would mean handing NATO's northern flank to the Soviets. The only tactic left was to physically put yourself in the way.

In the spring of nineteen seventy-three, British frigates entered the area directly on protection duty; over the course of the second phase of the conflict, thirty-two frigates served in rotation. Now the ships were cutting across one another's bows, closing off one another's sterns, passing at ever shorter range. Collisions became inevitable. Some were errors of handling; some were not. Steel hulls tore at each other, and gashes opened above the waterline.

On the twenty-ninth of August, nineteen seventy-three, Ayir collided with the British frigate Apollo. The Icelandic ship's hull was damaged, and the crew set about repairs while still at sea. As seawater flooded the compartment, the engineer doing the welding, Halldór Hallfredsson, was electrocuted and killed. His was the only death in three separate phases of conflict, across hundreds of warp cuttings and collisions. History did not record him as a casualty of war; it could not, because there was no declared war. But in Reykjavik his death was read as proof of how seriously the matter was being taken.

Two months later, in November nineteen seventy-three, the two sides agreed on an interim arrangement. British trawlers could go on fishing inside the fifty-mile zone for another two years, but their annual catch would be capped at a hundred and thirty thousand tonnes. London saw it as a ceasefire. In reality it was a timetable for withdrawal with a ceiling attached, and the agreement was due to expire on the thirteenth of November, nineteen seventy-five. Everyone knew that date.

Before that date arrived, Iceland took the next step. In July nineteen seventy-five, the government announced that it would extend the fishing zone to two hundred miles; the decision came into force in the autumn. The reasoning was not only economic. A report published that year by the Marine Research Institute of Iceland said that the cod stock was heading for collapse at current levels of fishing and that the catch had to be cut back severely. With that, Reykjavik gained the strongest argument it could have asked for: this was not greed, it was a rescue operation.

Two hundred miles meant an expanse of sea around the island many times larger than the total land area of the British Isles, and it took in the entire livelihood of Britain's distant-water fleet. On the sixteenth of November, nineteen seventy-five, the third and harshest phase began. Britain deployed twenty-two frigates, along with supply ships, tugs and support vessels. On the Icelandic side there was once again the same handful of patrol boats: Ayir, Odin, Tor, Tir and Baldur.

This time the use of the cutter did not let up, but the main tactic shifted to ramming. Over the third phase, fifty-five collision incidents were recorded in all. Patrol vessels would drive in under the frigates' sterns, and the frigates would try to shoulder them away from the trawlers. In the winter sea of the North Atlantic, in darkness, in six-metre waves, steel hulls closing to within metres of one another. The footage was broadcast on British television every evening, and an uneasy question was growing in the public mind: why could one of the oldest navies in the world get nowhere against a country with no army at all?

Because the matter was not being settled at sea. The real card was in Reykjavik's hand, and its name was Keflavik.

Iceland, despite having no army, was one of the founding members of NATO in nineteen forty-nine. The reason was geography. The island sat squarely in the middle of the sea passage between Greenland and Britain, and when Soviet submarines wanted to move out of their bases in the Arctic Ocean and into the Atlantic, they had to pass through that gap. The air base at Keflavik had been opened to American forces under the defence agreement of nineteen fifty-one, and the submarine-hunting aircraft that took off from it operated the most critical listening and surveillance network on the alliance's northern flank. In the words of one commander, Keflavik was the sentry box at the door of the Atlantic.

The Icelandic government repeatedly raised the prospect of closing that base and, if necessary, leaving the alliance altogether. It may well have been a bluff; but Washington could not afford to call it. At a moment when Soviet naval activity in the Atlantic was at its peak, even the possibility of that base closing was unacceptable. And it was not forgotten that Iceland had sold fish to Moscow in the nineteen fifties. The arithmetic became simple: what Britain stood to gain was the livelihood of a few thousand fishermen; what it stood to lose was the strategic architecture of the North Atlantic.

On the nineteenth of February, nineteen seventy-six, Reykjavik broke off diplomatic relations with London. It was the first time in the history of the alliance that two NATO member states had severed relations with one another. This was the official announcement that a dispute over fish had become a crisis for the alliance.

What followed moved quickly. The Secretary General of NATO intervened personally, and the American administration increased its pressure on London. The British government was forced to accept that the military superiority it held could not be used politically. With the agreement signed in Oslo on the first of June, nineteen seventy-six, the third phase came to an end. The terms were plain: Britain was effectively recognising the two-hundred-mile zone. In return, no more than twenty-four trawlers at a time would be permitted to fish in the zone, with a total catch of thirty thousand tonnes. That permission would last six months and would expire of its own accord on the first of December, nineteen seventy-six. The frigates withdrew from Icelandic waters.

To the British public this was presented as a compromise. It was not a compromise. It was a calendar.

When the first of December, nineteen seventy-six, arrived, nothing happened. No guns were fired, no ceremony was held, no newspaper headline was written. The ships simply did not go back. The waters that distant-water trawlers sailing from Hull, Grimsby and Fleetwood had fished for three generations closed in law that morning, and never opened again.

The effect was felt almost immediately. The distant-water fleet fed not only a port's ships but the entire economy around them: ice factories, net lofts, fish processing plants, salt merchants, hauliers, shipyards. When the voyages stopped, all of it stopped at once. In the fishing neighbourhoods of Hull, on streets where every house had a seafarer in it, unemployment stopped being an economic indicator and became something you could see from the pavement. Thousands of fishermen, having spent their lives doing one job, learned that the job no longer existed. Worse still, because most of them were not technically even counted as permanent employees of the vessel owners, they received no redundancy payments. A man of fifty who knew nothing but the sea was left to start again in a port town that had shut down.

The struggle to win compensation for these men dragged on for decades. It was only in the early two thousands that payments were finally made to roughly one thousand three hundred former trawlermen. By then, many of them were no longer alive.

On the Icelandic side, victory proved a more complicated gift than expected. Once the foreign trawlers were gone, the truth that emerged was this: the sea was not infinite, and the only party now capable of exhausting it was Iceland itself. The country had to limit its own fleet in order to protect the waters it had won. From nineteen eighty-four onwards, a system was built up in stages, based on transferable catch quotas assigned to each vessel. The system made the stocks manageable, but it brought with it a new social argument: once a quota became a form of property, the sea too became something that could be bought and sold. Iceland is still having that argument today.

The real legacy, though, reached far beyond the North Atlantic. In the years when Iceland declared two hundred miles, no such limit had any standing in international law; even the International Court of Justice had ruled against Iceland. But what was actually happening at sea dragged the law along behind it. The principle Britain fought against in nineteen seventy-six was one it adopted itself at the beginning of nineteen seventy-seven, declaring a two-hundred-mile zone off its own coasts. In those same years, dozens of countries did the same. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, signed in nineteen eighty-two, turned the two-hundred-mile exclusive economic zone into a written rule worldwide. The legal foundation for the fact that the most productive stretches of the oceans are today considered to belong to coastal states — for those broad blue frames on the maps — comes from here.

What achieved this was not a navy. It was the stubbornness of a country with the population of a small town and no army at all — stubborn enough to make the other side's interests impossible to sustain. Iceland won no battles; it never needed to. What it won was the ruin of the other side's arithmetic. Every moment a steel trawl warp was cut was not a military loss for London but an accounting entry; and every moment the possible closure of Keflavik came onto the table was an alliance being forced to reorder its own priorities.

This eighteen-year struggle, remembered in history as the Cod Wars, shows that the balance of power is not always measured in tonnage and in the number of guns. Who can afford what matters just as much as who cannot afford to give something up. For Britain, fish was an industry. For Iceland, fish was the country itself. And when something is vital to one side and merely important to the other, the outcome is usually decided by the needs of the side for which it is vital.

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