PRECEDENT

A year after India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons, their armies fought a shooting war on Himalayan ridgelines above 16,000 feet — the first direct clash between two nuclear-armed states since the Sino-Soviet border fighting of 1969. In Washington, intelligence reports said Pakistan's nuclear arsenal was being readied while the artillery was still firing.

In January 1978 a Soviet nuclear-powered surveillance satellite tumbled out of orbit and broke apart over the Canadian Arctic, scattering radioactive debris across a stretch of frozen wilderness the size of a small country. NORAD tracked it the whole way down — and could do nothing but watch it fall.

In 1968 a Soviet ballistic-missile submarine sank in the deep Pacific northwest of Hawaii, taking its crew and its nuclear missiles to the seabed. Six years later the CIA built a 600-foot ship and a cover story about mining the ocean floor — to raise it in secret.

Days after a Japanese submarine shelled the California coast, an air-raid alarm threw Los Angeles into a blackout — and for an hour, anti-aircraft batteries fired more than a thousand shells into the night sky at an enemy that was never there.

Three months after Pearl Harbor, Japan tried again — flying two giant flying boats across open ocean, refueling from a submarine at a deserted reef, to bomb Honolulu in the dark. Clouds, not defenses, saved the city.

In 1969 North Korean fighters shot down an unarmed American reconnaissance plane over international waters, killing all 31 men aboard — the single deadliest loss of U.S. aircrew of the Cold War. The United States, weighing nuclear options, ultimately did nothing.

A spring morning in 1979 — an invisible cloud drifted over part of a Soviet city, and people downwind began to die. The source was a military bioweapons plant where weaponized anthrax had leaked into the air. The state blamed bad meat, and buried the truth for thirteen years.

Across the bay from Gibraltar, an interned Italian tanker sat rusting in neutral Spain. Inside its hull, Italian frogmen cut a secret underwater hatch and ran a covert war — riding manned torpedoes into the British anchorage to sink Allied ships, for nearly a year, undetected.

In October 1973, Arab oil producers turned a commodity into a weapon — cutting production and embargoing the United States over its support for Israel. Prices roughly quadrupled, and the industrial West learned that a supply chain can be a chokepoint with no strait on the map. It is the precedent every modern economic-coercion strategy stands on.

Japan launched thousands of paper-and-rubber balloons carrying bombs into the jet stream, aiming them across the entire Pacific Ocean at the American mainland. Most failed. One came down in an Oregon forest — and killed a pregnant woman and five children on a church picnic.

In the first months of 1942, German U-boats hunted freely along the American East Coast — torpedoing ships within sight of the beaches while the cities behind them stayed lit, silhouetting every target. More people died in those waters than at Pearl Harbor.

In June 1942 a Japanese force seized two American islands at the end of the Aleutian chain — the first foreign seizure of U.S. territory since the War of 1812. The villagers were shipped to a prison camp in Japan. Taking the islands back ended in one of the largest banzai charges of the war.

Eight trained saboteurs stepped off German U-boats onto American beaches carrying explosives, roughly $175,000 in U.S. cash, and a two-year target list. The plot didn't fail because they were caught. It failed because one of them picked up a phone and called the FBI.

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.

When China shelled the Nationalist-held island of Kinmen in 1958, Washington came to the edge of nuclear war over it. The crisis cooled into one of history's strangest cease-fires: the two sides shelled each other only on alternating days — a ritual bombardment that lasted about two decades.

Just after midnight, a Soviet early-warning bunker reported that the United States had launched its nuclear missiles. The duty officer had minutes to pass it up the chain — which meant retaliation. Convinced the computer was wrong, he called it a false alarm. It was.

After a midair collision, a B-47 pilot jettisoned a hydrogen bomb into the shallow water off Tybee Island to save his crippled plane. The Air Force searched for two months, never found it, and gave up. It is still down there.

After an Iranian mine nearly sank a U.S. frigate, the Navy retaliated in a single day, sinking or crippling much of Iran's surface fleet. It remains the largest U.S. surface naval battle since WWII — the precedent shadowing every U.S.–Iran clash in the Gulf today.

When the Six-Day War slammed both ends of the Suez Canal shut, fourteen cargo ships were caught in the middle — and stayed stranded for eight years. The crews built their own micro-society while desert sand slowly buried their hulls.

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.

When Colombia refused to hand over canal rights, the United States backed a Panamanian revolt, recognized the new country three days later, and signed a treaty granting itself the Canal Zone “in perpetuity.” A nation was manufactured to build a waterway.

In WWI, a naval blockade slowly starved Germany — hundreds of thousands of civilians died without a shot fired at them. A century later, China fears the same fate through a single strait it does not control: the “Malacca Dilemma.”