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.
Collapse of the Atlantic northwest cod fishery with these new statistics brought to light no changes were made in regards to the allotted yearly catch of cod. With only a limited knowledge of cod biology, scientists predicted that the population of the species would rebound from its low point in 1975 and when Canada extended its fishing boundaries in 1976, fish mortality decreased immediately. This was not due to a rise in cod stocks, it was because foreign trawlers could no longer fish the waters. Therefore, when Fisheries and Oceans set quotas, they overestimated the total stock, and increased the total allowable catch. In 1992, John Crosbie,