The Samson Option is a term used to describe Israel’s alleged deterrence strategy of massive retaliation with nuclear weapons as a “last resort” against nations whose military attacks threaten its existence, and possibly against other targets as well.[1] Israel refuses to admit it has nuclear weapons or to describe how it would use them, an official policy of nuclear ambiguity, also known as "nuclear opacity." This has made it difficult for anyone outside the Israeli government to definitively describe its true nuclear policy, while still allowing Israel to influence the perceptions, strategies and actions of other governments.[2]
As early as 1976, the CIA believed that Israel possessed 10 to 20 nuclear weapons.[3] By 2002 it was estimated that the number had increased to between 75 and 200 thermonuclear weapons, each in the multiple-megaton range.[4] Kenneth S. Brower has estimated as many as 400 nuclear weapons.[5] These can be launched from land, sea and air.[6] This gives Israel a second strike option even if much of the country is destroyed.[7]
The term "Samson Option" has also been used more generally in reference to Israel's nuclear program.[8] Commentators have also employed the term in reference to situations where non-nuclear, non-Israeli actors, such as Saddam Hussein,[9] Yassir Arafat[10] and Hezbollah[11] have threatened conventional weapons retaliation—and even regarding former United States President George W. Bush's foreign policy.[12]
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The original conception of the Samson Option was only as deterrence. According to US journalist Seymour Hersh and Israeli historian Avner Cohen, Israeli leaders like David Ben-Gurion, Shimon Peres, Levi Eshkol and Moshe Dayan coined the phrase in the mid-1960s. They named it after the biblical figure 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, mutilated him, and gathered to see him further humiliated in chains. They contrasted it with ancient siege of Masada where 936 Jewish Sicarii committed mass suicide rather than be defeated and enslaved by the Romans.[13]
Although nuclear weapons were viewed as the ultimate guarantor of Israeli security, as early as the 1960s the country avoided building its military around them, instead pursuing absolute conventional superiority so as to forestall a last resort nuclear engagement.[14]
Seymour Hersh writes that the "surprising victory of Menachem Begin's Likud Party in the May 1977 national elections...brought to power a government that was even more committed than Labor to the Samson Option and the necessity of an Israeli nuclear arsenal."[15]
Louis René Beres, a professor of Political Science at Purdue University, chaired Project Daniel, a group advising Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, argues in that paper and elsewhere that the effective deterrence of the Samson Option would be increased by ending the policy of nuclear ambiguity.[16] In a 2004 article he recommends Israel use the Samson Option threat to “support conventional preemptions” against enemy nuclear and non-nuclear assets because “without such weapons, Israel, having to rely entirely upon non-nuclear forces, might not be able to deter enemy retaliations for the Israeli preemptive strike.”[17] In 2002, the Los Angeles Times published an opinion piece by Louisiana State University professor David Perlmutter in which he wrote:
"Israel has been building nuclear weapons for 30 years. The Jews understand what passive and powerless acceptance of doom has meant for them in the past, and they have ensured against it. Masada was not an example to follow — it hurt the Romans not a whit, but Samson in Gaza? What would serve the Jew-hating world better in repayment for thousands of years of massacres but a Nuclear Winter. Or invite all those tut-tutting European statesmen and peace activists to join us in the ovens? For the first time in history, a people facing extermination while the world either cackles or looks away--unlike the Armenians, Tibetans, World War II European Jews or Rwandans--have the power to destroy the world. The ultimate justice?"[18]
In 2003, Martin van Creveld, a professor of military history at Israel’s Hebrew University, thought that the Al-Aqsa Intifada then in progress threatened Israel's existence.[19] Van Creveld was quoted in David Hirst's "The Gun and the Olive Branch" (2003) as saying:
"We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force. Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: 'Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.' I consider it all hopeless at this point. We shall have to try to prevent things from coming to that, if at all possible. Our armed forces, however, are not the thirtieth strongest in the world, but rather the second or third. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under.[20]