History doesn't repeat itself. But it sets a precedent.
Every conflict in the headlines has a forgotten precedent — a moment that already showed us how it ends. PRECEDENT finds them: short, cinematic history that explains the present, and lays out the record behind every claim.
The wars, weapons, and disasters that came within one switch, one decision, or one accident of changing everything — and the records that prove how close it got.
The straits, canals, and sea-lanes that decide wars — and the powers fighting over them right now. The precedent is always older than the headline.
The INS Eilat — the moment a single small craft proved a missile could kill a warship, and rewrote naval doctrine for the drone-and-missile age now unfolding in the Gulf.
The most-watched file in the archive, and the cleanest one-minute argument for what PRECEDENT does.
A B-52 broke apart over North Carolina and dropped two four-megaton hydrogen bombs on American soil. One went through nearly its entire arming sequence — a single low-voltage switch was all that stopped the detonation. The other buried itself in a field, and its core was never recovered.
Japan's Unit 731 weaponized the bubonic plague. In the final months of WWII it drew up a plan to carry the disease across the Pacific and release it over San Diego — a strike scheduled for weeks after Japan ultimately surrendered.
On a tiny, uninhabited island in a frozen river, a planned Chinese ambush of Soviet border guards spiraled into weeks of fighting — and Soviet officials are documented to have weighed a preemptive nuclear strike on China.
The first warship ever sunk by a ship-launched guided missile. Small Egyptian missile boats killed an Israeli destroyer from miles away — the moment cheap standoff weapons could sink capital ships, and the precedent for today's drone-and-missile naval war.
PRECEDENT is an independent, one-person archive. The visuals are AI-generated cinematic reconstructions — illustrative atmosphere, never claimed as documentary footage, and disclosed as synthetic on every upload.
The history is not. Every figure, date, and claim is drawn from primary documents and established scholarship, rounded only where popular history responsibly rounds, and attributed in-line where a claim is contested. The case files above exist so you can check the work yourself.
Each episode carries its primary record — memos, accident summaries, scholarship — listed in this archive.
AI-generated visuals are labeled as synthetic content on every video. No footage is presented as real.
Scripts are pressure-tested for overclaim before publication. Accuracy is the gate, not the score.