PRECEDENT

A poplar tree blocked the line of sight between two United Nations Command posts inside the Joint Security Area. A five-man work party went out to trim it. North Korean guards took the work party's own axes and killed two American officers with them. Three days later the tree came down behind the largest show of force the DMZ had seen since the armistice.

With the Japanese army advancing on Zhengzhou, the Chinese Nationalist government ordered its own engineers to breach the Yellow River dikes at Huayuankou. The flood did slow the advance. It also drowned or starved hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians, and for seven years the government let the world believe Japanese bombing had done it.

A Korean Air Lines Boeing 707 bound for Seoul drifted off course over the Arctic and crossed into Soviet airspace above the most heavily defended ground in the USSR. An interceptor put a missile into its left wing. The aircraft came down on a frozen lake, and 107 of the 109 people aboard walked away.

Argentina and Chile had spent a decade arguing over three islands at the bottom of the continent. In December 1978 Argentina launched Operación Soberanía to take them. The ships sailed, the troops moved — and the operation was called off hours in, for reasons that were not one reason.

Katangese rebels crossing from Angola seized the mining town of Kolwezi, where roughly three thousand European expatriates lived and worked. France put the 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment onto the town by air, jumping onto a drop zone it had not surveyed, with borrowed parachutes.

North Korean agents placed explosives in the roof of the Martyrs' Mausoleum in Rangoon and waited for the South Korean president to arrive for a wreath-laying. They detonated on a cue. The cue was wrong by a few minutes, and Chun Doo-hwan was still in his car.

Every other nuclear power tested warheads on towers, from aircraft, or underground. On 27 October 1966 China fired a ballistic missile carrying a live nuclear warhead across roughly 800 kilometres of its own territory and detonated it at the far end. It has not been done that way since, by anyone.

Iran and Iraq had spent years attacking each other's oil exports, and Kuwait's tankers were being hit in the crossfire. Kuwait asked Washington and Moscow both. Washington's answer was to reregister eleven Kuwaiti tankers as American ships and escort them — putting the US flag, and the US Navy's obligations, on another country's cargo.

Through the summer of 1984 merchant ships began taking underwater damage in the Gulf of Suez and the Red Sea — one after another, on one of the busiest trade routes on earth. There was no attacking navy. There were mines, and Egypt's investigators kept coming back to a civilian ro-ro ferry that had transited the canal days before the first explosion.

Four French generals opposed to de Gaulle's Algerian policy seized Algiers overnight using France's own elite paratroop regiment. For four days Paris genuinely expected them to come next — tanks went out around the National Assembly, and de Gaulle went on the radio to speak past the officers to the conscripts.

Unit 731 ran human experimentation and biological-weapons development at Pingfang outside Harbin for more than a decade, and field-tested what it built on Chinese towns. At the end of the war the United States acquired the programme's data and, in exchange, kept its directors out of the war crimes dock. That bargain, not the laboratory, is the part with the longer shadow.

Pakistan's only long-range submarine sailed 4,800 kilometres around India to hunt the carrier INS Vikrant and mine the approaches to Visakhapatnam. It never came home. India credits a destroyer's depth charges. Some of India's own senior officers have never been convinced.

A Russian cargo aircraft carrying ammunition to Kabul was forced down by a Taliban fighter jet and impounded at Kandahar with its seven-man crew. They were held for more than a year. Then they talked their guards into letting them run the engines for maintenance, and flew the aircraft out.

A Soviet submarine ran hard aground in restricted Swedish waters, well inside the defences of Sweden's principal naval base. It sat there for ten days. Swedish measurements of the hull indicated warhead material aboard, and a Soviet naval force came south while a neutral country decided what it was willing to do.

By 1970 Soviet pilots were flying combat air patrols over Egypt in Egyptian markings. Israel decided to find out whether they would fight, staged an air raid designed to look routine, and ambushed the response. It is the only air battle in history fought directly between Soviet and Israeli aircrew.

Two uninhabited rocks in the Aegean, with a combined area measured in hectares and a permanent population of goats, brought Greece and Turkey to the point of shooting at each other. Both are NATO members. It took an American envoy working the phones overnight to stop it.

The Soviet Union's first nuclear ballistic-missile submarine lost reactor coolant in the North Atlantic with no backup cooling system fitted. Eight men went into the reactor compartment in raincoats and gas masks to build a coolant line by hand. They saved the boat. None of them lived long.

The People's Liberation Army took a pair of small islands off the Chinese coast in its first combined air, sea and land operation. Within weeks the United States had evacuated a whole island group, Congress had pre-authorised the use of American forces, and the president had told a press conference that atomic weapons would be used the way one uses a bullet.

North Korea trained a thirty-one-man commando unit for two years against a full-scale replica of the South Korean presidential residence, then sent it through the DMZ to kill President Park Chung-hee. It got within a few hundred metres of the gate before a police challenge on a Seoul street turned into a firefight.

Vietnam had just beaten the United States, then invaded Cambodia and removed China's ally from power. China's answer was to put a quarter of a million soldiers across Vietnam's northern border to, in Deng Xiaoping's phrase, teach a lesson — while Moscow was treaty-bound to Hanoi and massed on China's other frontier.

Four days into the Cuban Missile Crisis, China attacked India along two Himalayan fronts at once. For a month the world's attention was somewhere else entirely. Nehru wrote to Kennedy asking for American fighter squadrons; Washington was otherwise engaged, and by the time it wasn't, China had stopped on its own.

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.”