11 minutes
The Samson Option
“Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.”
― General Moshe Dayan, Former IDF Chief
Samson destroying the pillars of the Temple of Dagon
― Painting by Vittorio Bigari
“This is a deterrence strategy of massive retaliation with nuclear weapons as a “last resort” against any country whose military has invaded and/or destroyed much of Israel. The name is a reference to the biblical Israelite judge Samson who pushed apart the pillars of a Philistine temple, bringing down the roof and killing himself and thousands of Philistines who had captured him.”
Source: Wikipedia: Samson Option
The term was coined by Israeli leaders David Ben-Gurion, Shimon Peres, Levi Eshkol and Moshe Dayan in the mid-1960s, and later became widely known through Seymour Hersh’s 1991 book The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. In its preface, Hersh writes: “This is a book about how Israel became a nuclear power in secret. It also tells how that secret was shared, sanctioned, and, at times, willfully ignored by the top political and military officials of the United States since the Eisenhower years.”
This is the theological DNA of Israel’s nuclear doctrine. It is rooted in a particular reading of chosenness that runs deeper than military strategy: the conviction that the Jewish state is so singular, so essential to the order of the world, that its destruction would render existence itself meaningless. Not “chosen to carry a burden,” but chosen such that if the chosen perish, the world deserves to perish with them. This is the ideological scaffolding for a state that would sooner reduce the region to glass than accept its own defeat.
Moshe Dayan’s words, “too dangerous to bother”, are not bluster from a retired general. They are the clearest articulation of the doctrine ever spoken aloud. Make the cost of opposing Israel not war, not sanctions, not diplomatic isolation, but the end of civilization itself. This is not deterrence. Deterrence says don’t attack me. The Samson Option says if I fall, everyone falls. And Israel has held this philosophy since before the state was formally declared.
What follows is the story of how that philosophy was armed: first through theft and deception, then wielded as blackmail against superpowers, and now, in 2026, threatening to become real.
I. Israel’s Smuggled Nuclear Arsenal
Nine countries possess nuclear weapons. Eight admit it. The ninth, Israel, built its arsenal through theft, espionage, and deception that dwarfs anything Iran has ever been accused of. Everything used to justify bombing Iran (secret enrichment, covert weapons research, refusal to cooperate), Israel did first, did worse, and faced no consequences. Iran signed the NPT, allowed IAEA inspectors, and negotiated the JCPOA. Israel stole what it needed, lied about what it built, and was rewarded with the largest foreign aid package in American history.
The French Connection
In the early 1950s, France needed help with nuclear physics; Israel needed a bomb. Israeli scientists embedded at France’s Marcoule nuclear complex, the only foreigners granted access, in exchange for intelligence to help crush the Algerian independence movement. Ben-Gurion advised de Gaulle to partition Algeria between settlers and natives, what de Gaulle called “a French Israel in Africa.”
After the failed 1956 Suez invasion, where France, Britain, and Israel conspired to attack Egypt, French PM Guy Mollet felt France owed Israel the bomb. By 1958, France began building a reactor at Dimona in the Negev, with a secret six-story chemical reprocessing plant buried underground. A reprocessing plant has only one purpose: converting spent fuel into weapons-grade plutonium.
In February 1960, France detonated its first nuclear weapon in Algeria. American U-2 spy planes noted an Israeli scientific team standing alongside the French. Two nations, one nuclear test. Israel had the blueprints.
The Textile Factory
Israel told Eisenhower that Dimona was a textile factory. U-2 photographs from 1958 showed a carbon copy of Marcoule. When the CIA briefed Eisenhower, he showed no interest and asked no questions.
The New York Times broke the story in December 1960. Ben-Gurion pivoted: “peaceful purposes,” then “desalination.” Kennedy demanded inspections. Israel turned them into theater: fake control rooms outputting false readings, blocked access to the reactor core, false walls plastered over elevator doors hiding the underground reprocessing plant. Lead inspector Floyd Culler later admitted vital information had been withheld from him.
By 1966, Dimona was feeding plutonium into Israel’s weapons program. On May 28, 1967, one week before the Six-Day War, Israel assembled its first two nuclear bombs. Iran, by contrast, invited inspectors in, signed the NPT, and installed IAEA cameras in its own facilities. Iran is the one being bombed.
Stealing from America
Between 200 and 300 kilograms of highly enriched uranium vanished from the NUMEC plant in Pennsylvania. CIA testimony confirmed Israel stole it. Israeli intelligence agents, including Rafi Eitan (who captured Adolf Eichmann), visited NUMEC under fake identities. By 1968, traces bearing the unique Portsmouth signature from the US government’s own diffusion plant had appeared at Dimona. One nuclear official called it “one of the most glaring cases of diverted nuclear material.” The NUMEC cleanup will cost American taxpayers $350 million.
In the 1980s, the LAKAM spy network smuggled hundreds of krytrons (nuclear detonation triggers) to Israel through LAKAM operative Arnon Milchan, now a billionaire Hollywood producer. In 1972, Milchan’s team bribed a German URENCO employee to “misplace” centrifuge blueprints. The same URENCO designs were stolen by Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan. Iran later bought Khan’s blueprints. All three programs are near identical, Israel was reportedly able to test the Stuxnet virus on its own centrifuges before deploying it against Iran. Three countries with the same stolen technology; only one is being bombed for it.
LAKAM head Rafi Eitan also handled Jonathan Pollard, who sold 500,000 pages of classified American documents to Israel, including codes to intercept US diplomatic communications. The material leaked to apartheid South Africa, Pakistan, and the Soviet Union.
Partners in Apartheid
After France cut off uranium supply in 1967, Israel partnered with apartheid South Africa. South Africa’s PM John Vorster, jailed in WWII for Nazi sympathies, visited Israel in 1976. One Israeli official: “They are also European settlers standing against a hostile world.” South Africa gave Israel 600+ tons of yellowcake uranium. Israel helped South Africa build its own nuclear program and offered nuclear-capable Jericho missiles.
On September 22, 1979, a Vela satellite detected a nuclear explosion off South Africa’s coast. Navy acoustic sensors confirmed it. Radiation reached sheep in Australia. South Africa had no warheads yet. Senate adviser Leonard Weiss: “The weight of evidence that the Vela event was an Israeli nuclear test assisted by South Africa appears overwhelming.” Carter’s diary confirmed it: “The Israelis did indeed conduct a nuclear test explosion in the ocean near the southern end of Africa.” His administration buried it. No sanctions, no consequences.
America’s Silence
Every president since Kennedy has known. Every one chose silence.
In 1968, CIA Director Helms told Johnson that Israel had built nuclear weapons. Johnson ignored it to protect the NPT negotiations. When staff tried to condition F-4 Phantom jet sales on Israel signing the NPT, Johnson said: “Sell them anything they want. Don’t bother me with this anymore.”
In 1969, Nixon agreed with Golda Meir that the US would never again question Israel’s nuclear program. Inspections stopped permanently. In 2018, it was revealed that four consecutive presidents (Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump) each wrote private letters promising never to press the issue.
Under the Glenn Amendment, any state that detonates a nuclear device must be sanctioned. Pakistan was sanctioned. Taiwan was pressured. Iraq was invaded. Iran is being bombed, for a program built on the same stolen blueprints as Israel’s, except Iran signed the NPT and allowed inspectors. Israel remains the largest recipient of American foreign aid.
II. The Samson Option as Strategy from Day One
Statue of “Samson the Hero” in Ashdod, Israel
The Samson Option is not a contingency plan. It is the founding logic of the state.
In April 1948, before Israel was formally declared, while Zionist militias were destroying 500 Palestinian villages and driving 800,000 people from their homes, Ben-Gurion wrote to an operative in Europe: import scientists who could “increase the capacity to kill masses.” His rival Jabotinsky had already articulated the philosophy: the native population would never accept dispossession, so the state required an “iron wall” of permanent military supremacy. Ben-Gurion gave this philosophy a nuclear dimension.
1973: The First Nuclear Blackmail
Egypt and Syria attacked on October 6, 1973 to retake territories occupied since 1967 (territories the UN demanded Israel return under Resolution 242). Israel’s military was caught off guard. Defense Minister Dayan declared: “This is the end of the Third Temple.”
Israel readied its nuclear arsenal. F-4 Phantoms were loaded with nuclear bombs targeting Cairo and Damascus. The preparations were made deliberately visible to American and Soviet satellites. Kissinger, who had planned to let Israel take hits to broker a peace deal, reversed overnight. Schlesinger reported: “Kissinger just turned around totally. He got a little hysterical.” Israel received an immediate massive resupply. When Kissinger later met Sadat, he admitted it had been “serious, more serious than you can imagine.”
The arsenal was not pointed at Cairo alone. It was pointed at the international order. Give us what we want, or we burn it all down.
The Begin Doctrine
The offensive counterpart: Israel can have nuclear weapons, no one else can. In 1981, Israeli jets bombed Iraq’s Osirak reactor before it came online, the world’s first airstrike on a nuclear facility. Even the Mossad director opposed it, arguing there was no evidence Iraq could build a bomb. The doctrine is not about evidence. It is about monopoly. The same logic drove Stuxnet, the assassination of Iranian scientists, and strikes on Syrian facilities.
In 1986, Mordechai Vanunu leaked photographs of Dimona’s underground plutonium plant to the Sunday Times, revealing 200+ warheads, ten times CIA estimates. Mossad lured him to Rome, drugged him, and brought him back. He spent over a decade in solitary confinement. The man who told the truth was punished more severely than anyone who built the arsenal.
Saying It Out Loud
For decades, Israel sustained “nuclear opacity” (amimut): neither confirm nor deny. That pretense is fading. In 2023, Heritage Minister Eliyahu called for dropping “doomsday weapons” on Gaza. Netanyahu has stood before Dimona and said Israel “can also wipe countries off the map.” Colin Powell, in a leaked 2015 email: “The boys in Tehran know Israel has 200, all targeted at Tehran.”
In 2012, Nobel laureate Günter Grass published “What Must Be Said”, breaking the “general silence” around Israel’s arsenal. Israel declared him persona non grata and demanded his Nobel be revoked. But it was Israeli poet Itamar Yaoz-Kest, a Holocaust survivor, who gave the most revealing reply:
“If you force us yet again to descend from the face of the Earth to the depths of the Earth, let the Earth roll toward the Nothingness.”
If we go, everyone goes. The Samson Option, stated as poetry.
III. 2026 Escalations
On February 28, 2026, Israel and the US launched coordinated strikes on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure (the second wave, following June 2025), hitting the Khandab reactor, Ardakan yellowcake facility, and Natanz enrichment site. Netanyahu claimed to have “smashed” Iran’s program, assassinated eight nuclear scientists, and destroyed every functioning enrichment facility.
A state that stole its nuclear materials, smuggled detonation triggers through Hollywood producers, and built its program behind fake walls is now bombing another country for pursuing the same technology. Iran signed the NPT. Israel did not. Iran allowed inspectors. Israel expelled them. The Begin Doctrine, enforced with American bombs.
On March 21, 2026, Iran struck back. Two 4,000-km-range ballistic missiles hit Dimona and Arad, near the Negev Nuclear Research Center, the same site Ben-Gurion once called a textile factory. Iron Dome failed to intercept them. ~200 injured. Iran also struck the US-UK base at Diego Garcia. For the first time, Israel’s nuclear heartland was within reach.
Future of the region
In 2014, after Israel’s war on Gaza, eighteen Arab UN member states pushed for Israel to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty. They did not ask Israel to dismantle its arsenal. They simply asked for international law to be applied: for regular inspections, the same standard applied to every other state. The vote was 161 in favor, five against. The five: the United States, Israel, Canada, Palau, and Micronesia.
The world asked for the bare minimum. Five countries said no and US was one of them.
What makes the current trajectory uniquely dangerous is the nature of the two states now locked in escalation. Iran is a theocracy that has spent four decades preparing its population for martyrdom. Its leadership frames sacrifice not as a cost but as a religious duty. It has no nuclear weapons, but it has demonstrated a willingness to absorb punishment that no western calculus can predict: 5,000 drones, 2,100 missiles, a dead Supreme Leader, and still no surrender. A state with nothing left to lose does not behave like a state that can be deterred.
On the other side sits Israel, a state whose founding nuclear doctrine is explicitly suicidal: if we fall, we take the region with us. Two nations, both operating under end-times logic, both willing to accept destruction as long as the enemy is destroyed too. One has the Samson Option. The other has the psychology of a nation that considers death in battle a gateway to paradise. Neither framework has an off-ramp.
This is the danger. Not a rational miscalculation, but a collision between two forms of absolutism, each convinced that defeat is worse than annihilation. The temple pillars are shaking. The question is whether anyone will stop pushing before they come down.