PRECEDENT

What happened then, and what does it tell us now?

For most of 2026, the average U.S. gallon of gas has cost more than $4, and September was the most expensive September on record. The Iran war has squeezed the Strait of Hormuz, where ships have been hit and some have sunk.

In 1979, trouble in Iran reached American pumps too: gas lines, odd-even rationing, and a President who cancelled his energy speech, spent ten days at Camp David, and came back with a different one. This is that precedent, and what it tells us now.

This year, as of 22 Oct 2026 (the recording date)

• Gas cost $4 or more in 25 of the year's first 42 weeks; $4.28 in the week of 19 Oct (U.S. EIA).
• September 2026 averaged $4.33, beating the September record of $3.83 (2023). The all-time highs are still June 2022 (AAA, 1 Oct).
• In September, gasoline accounted for over half of the month's rise in consumer prices, and was up 34.2% over 12 months (BLS, 14 Oct).
• Before the war, about a fifth of global oil and LNG trade passed through Hormuz. In October two ships sank near the strait after being hit (Reuters via AJOT, 15 Oct).
• Adjusted for inflation: unleaded averaged $0.949 a gallon in July 1979, about $4.37 in September 2026 dollars (BLS average price × CPI-U). The BLS average for September 2026 was $4.48.

What the record shows

• Striking oil workers halted Iran's production at the end of December 1978; exports did not resume until March. “It takes two months to transport oil from Iran to the United States” (Carter, 16 May 1979).
• May: the lines hit California; odd-even rationing began 9 May in at least nine counties. 10 May: the House rejected standby gasoline rationing, 159–246.
• GAO, September 1979: “DOE regulations caused the companies to reduce gasoline allocations beyond the amount of their Iranian imports.” (EMD-79-97)
• 4–5 July: Carter cancelled the 5 July address. The White House said he was assessing issues that “include, but go beyond, the question of energy.”
• 15 July: the address from the Oval Office: “It is a crisis of confidence.” The word “malaise” is not in it (text).
• 28 January 1981: Executive Order 12287 ended price and allocation controls on crude oil and refined products.

Careful points. How much oil America lost: an early estimate was about 2.5% of what the country used (San Francisco Fed, 9 March 1979); GAO later put it somewhat higher. The rules were one cause among several, not the only one. Iran's Revolutionary Guard has claimed mine strikes in mid-October; they are unconfirmed. The film says only that ships were hit.

How hard do you hit back, and where do you stop?

This October, two cargo ships sank near the Strait of Hormuz (Reuters, 14–15 Oct 2026). Iran's Revolutionary Guard says one hit a mine; U.S. Central Command says an Iranian projectile hit it. The last time a mine in the Gulf pulled American warships into battle with Iran was April 1988: Operation Praying Mantis. This is that precedent, and what it tells us now.

Monday, 18 April 1988: American warships warned the men on two Iranian oil platforms to get off, then opened fire. Four days earlier a mine had nearly sunk the frigate USS Samuel B. Roberts, and Washington blamed Iran. Reagan's plan, in his diary: two platforms, possibly three; one Iranian naval vessel. “We seek no killing.” By evening two Iranian warships had been sunk, and Washington had ordered the shooting to stop.

This October, as of 22 Oct 2026 (the recording date)

• Two ships lost: the container ship GFS Pride (sank 14 Oct) and the bulk carrier Cape Dao (report).
• The IRGC says the container ship struck a mine (Maritime Executive). CENTCOM says an IRGC projectile hit her, not a mine (Al Jazeera).
• Brent above $100: September spot averaged $114.16 (EIA); December futures settled at $109.11 on 20 Oct.

What the record shows

• 14 April: the Roberts spotted three mines, backed out, and struck a fourth. Two main spaces flooded; nobody died.
• 19 April, the War Powers report: the mines still in the water were M-08s, the type Iran had been caught laying from the Iran Ajr. “No doubt exists that Iran laid these mines.”
• 18 April: Sassan and Sirri were attacked after warnings; a third strike, on Rakhsh, was called off. Iran answered. Joshan fired a Harpoon and was sunk; Sahand was sunk, at least 45 of her crew killed; Sabalan was left burning. Carlucci approved Crowe's recommendation “to cease any further hostile action.”
• One U.S. helicopter, a Marine AH-1T Sea Cobra, went down after dark; both crew were killed.
• 6 November 2003, the ICJ, Oil Platforms (Iran v. United States): the mine evidence was “highly suggestive, but not conclusive”; neither the operation nor the attack on the platforms was a proportionate use of force in self-defence. No treaty breach found: no reparations.

Everything here comes from the record. Where we lean on a historian, we name him.

The plane came down. The strike never came. Why?

On Saturday, 27 October 1962, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over eastern Cuba, and its pilot, Major Rudolf Anderson, was killed. Four days earlier, President Kennedy had approved a plan for exactly that moment: if a U-2 was brought down by clearly hostile fire, the recommendation would be immediate retaliation on the most likely surface-to-air missile site. The plane came down. The strike never came.

This film follows the answer through the minutes of Kennedy's own meetings, published in Foreign Relations of the United States, Robert Kennedy's memorandum of his meeting with the Soviet ambassador, Khrushchev's letters, the Soviet defence minister's cable to his commander in Cuba, and the film shot at the time.

What the record shows

• 22 October, at the National Security Council: “What is our response if one of our U-2 planes is shot down by a SAM missile?”
• 23 October: the President approved a contingency plan. If a U-2 was brought down and the evidence of hostile action was very clear, “the recommendation will be for immediate retaliation upon the most likely surface-to-air site involved in this action.” If the President could not be reached, the Secretary of Defense could give the order.
• 27 October, around 10:20 a.m. local time: two Soviet missiles burst beside Anderson's U-2 near Banes. The same day another U-2, on an air-sampling flight from Alaska, strayed over the Soviet Union, and low-flying American reconnaissance jets were fired on over western Cuba.
• 4 p.m.: General Maxwell Taylor wanted an air attack the next day on the site that fired. The minutes record McNamara: “Invasion had become almost inevitable.” Kennedy: “We will decide tomorrow how we return fire after we know if they continue their attacks on our planes and after we hear from U Thant the Russian reply to our offer.”
• 7:45 p.m.: Robert Kennedy met Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin at the Justice Department. His memorandum, dated 30 October, says there could be “no quid pro quo.” A sentence saying the matter could be resolved in “four or five months” was crossed out of the typed draft.
• 9 p.m.: twenty-four air reserve squadrons were called up, and Kennedy restated the rule: if reconnaissance planes were fired on tomorrow, and once the results of U Thant's talks were known, the SAM sites would be taken out.
• Sunday, 28 October: Khrushchev agreed to dismantle the weapons, crate them and return them to the Soviet Union. In the same letter he raised the U-2 that had strayed over Chukotka.
• The same day, the Soviet defence minister cabled his commander in Cuba: “We believe that you were too hasty in shooting down the US U-2 reconnaissance plane…” According to the Soviet officers' own later accounts, the order to fire was given in Cuba by local commanders who could not reach their general.
• Rudolf Anderson was awarded the first Air Force Cross.

So what changed in Moscow? And why could no one stop it?

In late October 1956, students, young workers and teenagers fought the Soviet army in the streets of Budapest. Within about a week, the tanks pulled out of the city, and Moscow promised in print that its troops would leave. On the morning that promise appeared in Pravda, the Soviet leadership met in the Kremlin and changed its mind. Days later, the tanks came back. The world protested. The UN voted. Nothing stopped them.

This film follows the answer through the Kremlin's own working notes, the Soviet declaration of 30 October, President Eisenhower's address, the UN record and the newsreels of 1956.

What the record shows

• 23 October: students marched through Budapest, and hundreds of thousands joined them. Their demands began with the withdrawal of all Soviet troops, and asked for free elections with more than one party and Imre Nagy as prime minister.
• By the next morning Soviet tanks were in the streets, and Nagy had been made prime minister. After five days his government announced a ceasefire; two days later the Soviet tanks began to pull out of Budapest.
• 30–31 October: Moscow's declaration went out on the radio and was printed in Pravda. Soviet troops would leave Budapest as soon as the Hungarian government judged it necessary.
• 31 October, the Kremlin: the notes kept by a party official, secret until after the Soviet Union fell, record Khrushchev's turn: “We should reexamine our assessment and should not withdraw our troops from Hungary and Budapest.” His reasons: a retreat would be read as weakness by the West and would not be accepted by his own party, with the Suez Crisis under way in Egypt. “We have no other choice.”
• The historian Mark Kramer believes Moscow would have invaded anyway, and that Suez made it faster.
• 31 October, Eisenhower on television: “We could not, of course, carry out this policy by resort to force.”
• 4 November: the tanks came back before dawn. Nagy broadcast at 5:20 a.m., then took refuge in the Yugoslav embassy; he was later seized, and executed in 1958. More than 2,500 Hungarians and nearly 700 Soviet soldiers were killed.
• At the UN, the Soviet Union vetoed an American resolution in the Security Council. The Council sent the question to an emergency session of the General Assembly, which voted 50 to 8 for a Soviet withdrawal “without delay.” The Assembly can only recommend.
• About 200,000 Hungarians fled, most of them into Austria. The United States took in about 38,000; most passed through Camp Kilmer, New Jersey.
• 2022: after Russia's veto over Ukraine, the Security Council again sent the question to an emergency session of the General Assembly, which voted 141 to 5 for Russia to “immediately, completely and unconditionally withdraw.” The same procedure had been used against Moscow once in between, over Afghanistan in 1980.
• On 16 June 1989 Imre Nagy was given a public funeral in Budapest. On 23 October 1989 Hungary declared itself a republic. The last Soviet soldier left in 1991.

Some of what the film says rests on sources it does not name aloud: the radio-building shooting and the size of the crowd are from the UN Special Committee's report (1957); the make-up of the fighters is from a history published by Hungary's defence ministry; the casualty figures are from the Hungarian Central Statistical Office's 1957 count as reported.

Why did America ration gasoline when it had gasoline, and why wasn't the fix already built?

In February 1942 the tanker R.P. Resor, carrying fuel oil from Texas to New England, was torpedoed about twenty miles off the coast of New Jersey. By May, people on the East Coast were being told how much gasoline they were allowed to buy. Yet the country was not short of oil: in the Midwest and along the Gulf, the government's own history says, the storage tanks were almost full.

This film follows the answer through the official history of the Petroleum Administration for War, the Eastern Sea Frontier's war diary, the Rubber Survey Committee's report, and the newsreels of the time.

What the record shows

• Before the war, more than 95 percent of the oil shipped to the East Coast came by tanker. Pipelines brought in almost nothing.
• In December 1940, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes warned the President about the East Coast's dependence on tankers and urged him to consider large pipelines from the Southwest. In May 1941 Roosevelt made him Petroleum Coordinator for National Defense.
• On 9 September 1941 Ickes formally asked for the steel for a crude-oil line from East Texas to the East Coast. The board that allocated war materials said no; the appeal was rejected on 6 November. The official history adds: “One month and one day later was Pearl Harbor.”
• From February to the end of May 1942, fifty American tankers went down between the Caribbean and Newfoundland. On 20 February the oil administration asked for the pipeline steel again; four days later it was denied again.
• Rationing began on the East Coast on 15 May 1942. The basic coupon ration from July was four gallons a week.
• Nationwide rationing, from 1 December 1942, was about rubber. The Rubber Survey Committee: “The limitation on the use of gasoline is not due to shortage of that commodity. It is wholly a measure of rubber saving.”
• The steel for the western half of the Big Inch was approved on 10 June 1942, the eastern half in October. The pipe was laid in 350 days; on 14 August 1943 oil from Texas reached the Philadelphia area overland.

So why wasn't America first into orbit?

On 6 December 1957, at Cape Canaveral, Vanguard Test Vehicle Three — America's answer to Sputnik — rose about four feet, fell back onto the pad and exploded, in front of the world's press. Two months earlier, the Deputy Secretary of Defense had told President Eisenhower that the Army's Redstone rocket, had it been used, could have orbited a satellite a year or more before.

This film follows the answer through the government's own papers: the 1955 National Security Council policy that gave the satellite a rocket of its own, the White House meeting of 8 October 1957, the Defense Department's statement after the explosion, and the Army launch that came 84 days after its order.

What the record shows

• NSC 5520 (May 1955), approved by Eisenhower, said considerable prestige would go to the nation that launched the first satellite — especially if the USSR were first. It also said the satellite program must not materially delay other major defense programs, and that the satellite would test the principle of “freedom of space”.
• On 8 October 1957, four days after Sputnik, Deputy Secretary of Defense Donald Quarles told Eisenhower there was no doubt the Redstone could have orbited a satellite a year or more earlier, and that the Army could launch one four months after an order (the staff secretary's memorandum of the meeting). Eisenhower would not switch.
• The next day, the White House statement admitted that merging the satellite with the military programs could have produced an orbiting American satellite before now, “but to the detriment of scientific goals and military progress.”
• On 8 November 1957 the Defense Secretary ordered the Army to launch a satellite too. Vanguard TV-3 failed on 6 December. The Defense Department's release the next day said that since military rocketry was not involved, the incident had no bearing on the missile programs.
• Explorer 1, on the Army's Jupiter C, lifted off at 10:48 pm EST on 31 January 1958 — 84 days after the order.
• In the 8 October meeting, Quarles also said the Russians had done the United States “a good turn”, unintentionally, in establishing the concept of freedom of international space, and Eisenhower asked about a reconnaissance vehicle. Words in NSC 5520 that were still withheld when NASA published the paper in 1995 are given in a CIA history released in 2008: research toward large satellites “for additional research and intelligence purposes”.
• Annex B to NSC 5520, from Nelson Rockefeller, Special Assistant to the President: “The stake of prestige … makes this a race that we cannot afford to lose.”

What wrecked the Paris summit?

On 1 May 1960 an American U-2 came down near Sverdlovsk. The pilot lived, the camera survived, and the cover story the United States had been keeping ready since 1956 collapsed in public over the next six days.

What wrecked the Paris summit was not the shootdown. It was what Washington did afterwards — and what it refused to do.

Every document quoted in this film is a primary source.

Who got aboard, who was left on the shore, and who decided?

In December 1950, American and South Korean forces were evacuating northeastern North Korea by sea through the port of Hungnam. The ships had been gathered to carry an army out. Then civilians began arriving by the tens of thousands, looking for a way out with it — and there were only so many ships, and only until Christmas Eve.

This film follows the two weeks of the evacuation through dated U.S. Army and Navy film from December 1950, and the official histories that cite the records of the men who ran it.

What the record shows

• The ships had to carry about 105,000 American and South Korean troops, 17,500 vehicles and 350,000 measurement tons of cargo (Navy final count). Navy planners expected to need room for about 25,000 refugees.
• X Corps at first tried to keep civilians out of the port. Those who got through were screened and boarded as shipping space became available. The policy came from Maj. Gen. Edward Almond; Rear Adm. James Doyle's Task Force 90 assembled the ships; Col. Edward Forney, USMC, ran the loading.
• On 20 December, the caption filed with the archival film estimated more than 60,000 men, women and children in the lines.
• The merchant ship SS Meredith Victory, built to carry twelve passengers, carried more than 14,000 people on one voyage (U.S. Maritime Administration).
• By the Army's count, more than 86,000 civilians left Hungnam by sea from 11 December. Counting Wonsan and Songjin, 98,100 were carried out of northeastern Korea. By the Army's own estimate, about as many again were left behind for lack of shipping space.
• On 24 December, the last troops left the beaches and the port was demolished behind them.

Some of this story rests on later recollection — Almond's oral-history interview, Doyle's 1979 account, and Hyun Bong-hak's memoir. The film labels those as later accounts, separate from the contemporary record.

Why didn't the United States take it back?

On 23 January 1968, North Korean naval forces seized the USS Pueblo in the Sea of Japan. Eleven months later, the 82 surviving crewmen walked across the Bridge of No Return at Panmunjom. The ship stayed — and is still a museum on a river in Pyongyang, still carried by the U.S. Navy as an active commissioned ship.

Why didn't the United States take it back? Not as a mystery, but as a question the record answers. This film follows the meeting notes, the cables, the options papers and the document signed at Panmunjom, and keeps five objectives apart that are usually run together: getting the crew back, getting the ship back, retaliating, deterring, and signalling.

How did the command centers work out that the attack on their screens was the system's own mistake?

On 9 November 1979, the screens at NORAD — and at the Pentagon, Strategic Air Command and the other U.S. command centers — showed a Soviet missile attack already under way. None of the missiles existed. Seven months later, in June 1980, it happened again, from a completely different fault.

This film reconstructs both incidents from the declassified record: how the warning got into the system in 1979, how corrupted messages got out of it in 1980, and how, each time, the command centers worked out that the attack their screens were reporting was the system's own mistake.

Many of these documents were obtained and published by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

How could the wind be acceptable and the fallout still land there?

On 1 March 1954, the United States set off Castle Bravo at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands — the largest nuclear explosion ever conducted by the United States. Before the shot, the task force had worked out where its radioactive fallout was allowed to go, and inhabited islands were supposed to stay outside that area. By the task force's own account, the wind that morning stayed within its limits and the forecast was essentially correct. The fallout still came down on Rongelap, where 64 people lived.

This film follows the answer through the task force's own records: the midnight briefing where Rongelap was named, the 1954 report film's forecast-and-actual wind chart, the April review of the forecast, and the calculation the task force changed before its next shot.

What the record shows

• Before each shot, a downwind sector called the Significant Quadrant — 30 degrees wide, reaching 500 miles from the shot — marked where harmful fallout might come down. It was not permitted to include inhabited islands.
• At the midnight briefing, the most pessimistic wind case sent the debris toward Rongelap and Rongerik. Rongelap was named and judged out of reach: on that plot, fallout would take 12 to 15 hours to get there.
• The predicted yield was 4 to 8 megatons. Bravo yielded 15.
• The task force's 1954 report film says the actual wind was some ten degrees less favourable than forecast, still within “the area of acceptable fallout,” and blames the unexpected high yield. The task force's April 1954 review called the forecast essentially correct and the ten degrees well within normal forecast error.
• The prediction started from a column of debris about fifteen miles across. What formed was a cloud about a hundred miles across, resting on top of the weather, and heavy debris fell back out of it within hours.
• A study published by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency in 2013 concluded that the high yield made things worse but was not, in itself, why the fallout reached the inhabited atolls.
• Before the next shot, the task force changed its fallout calculation for high-yield bursts, treating the source as an area rather than a point. By mid-April, winds that put inhabited atolls in line of the fallout were a reason to postpone.
• Rongelap was evacuated on 3 March 1954 and Utirik the next day. The people of Rongelap went home in the summer of 1957. Three years later, the Brookhaven medical survey reported that radioactive cesium and strontium in their bodies had risen since the return — recorded as well below the permissible limits of the day.

Why did Americans wait in gas lines when the country was short by a single-digit share of the oil it used?

In the winter of 1973–74, Americans waited in gas lines — but the country was short by a single-digit share of the oil it used. The Arab oil embargo was real. So were the price controls and the 1972-based allocation rules that decided how a shortage was shared out.

This film follows one photographer's record of Oregon's gas stations, from June 1973 — four months before the embargo — to May 1974, and the federal documents and data behind what he saw.

If the airlift didn't end the blockade, what did?

In June 1948 the Soviet Union closed every road, railway and canal into western Berlin and cut the electricity. More than two million people were inside a city that had stopped being supplied.

The airlift is remembered as an act of defiance. It was an act of throughput.

Two thirds of everything flown in was coal, not food, because Berlin's power stations were in the Soviet sector. The limit was never how many aircraft the West could find — it was how many could land. After a day in August 1948 when the traffic over Tempelhof collapsed into a blind stack, the operation was rebuilt around a single rule: one approach, and if you missed it you flew your coal back to Frankfurt. And because a conveyor needs somewhere to set things down, the Western powers built a third airport inside the blockaded city — Tegel, begun on 5 August 1948, laid on the crushed brick of Berlin's own bombed buildings by something close to twenty thousand Berliners working in three shifts, finished in ninety-two days.

But the airlift is not what ended the blockade.

The Western allies were running a blockade of their own — Ruhr coal, steel and machinery, cut off from the Soviet zone. In March 1949 the State Department recorded that it was “seriously affecting the economic welfare of the Soviet zone.” And when Stalin named his price that January, he asked for the trade embargo to be lifted and said nothing at all about the currency question the blockade had been imposed over. Asked whether that silence meant anything, Moscow answered that the omission was “not accidental.”

A blockade is a bet that the other side's supply problem is harder than your own.

Britain accepted a ceasefire while its military operation was still progressing. Why?

In 1956, Britain and France invaded Egypt during the Suez Crisis. Their military operation was still progressing when Britain accepted a ceasefire. But the battlefield was only one part of the crisis.

Sterling was under pressure. Britain's dollar reserves were falling. Oil supplies were disrupted. The United Nations was demanding a ceasefire. The Soviet Union was issuing threats. And the financial support Britain increasingly needed ran through Washington.

The popular version of Suez often reduces this to a single dramatic threat from President Eisenhower. The surviving record tells a more interesting story. America did not need to destroy Britain's currency. Britain already needed financial and energy support that Washington could withhold.

Suez exposed a distinction that still matters: having military power is not the same as having the freedom to use it.