Cod Wars 30,000 tons. While Iceland came closest to withdrawing from NATO and expelling US forces in the Second Cod War, Iceland actually took the most serious action in all of the Cod Wars in the Third Cod War by ending diplomatic relations with the United Kingdom on 19 February 1976. Although Icelandic government was firmly pro-Western, the government linked Iceland's NATO membership with the outcomes of the fishery dispute. If a favorable outcome could not be reached, Iceland implied that it would withdraw from NATO. However, the government never explicitly linked the US Defence Agreement to the outcome of the dispute.
Cod Wars fishing communities lost access to rich areas and were devastated, with thousands of jobs lost. Since 1982, a 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 "Ægir" after