Image Source: Gustave Doré – Doré’s English Bible – Public Domain
The Samson Option is not a metaphor Israel stumbled into. It is a doctrine named for a suicide. In the Book of Judges, Samson, blinded and chained, asks to die with the Philistines and pulls the temple down on the crowd and on himself. Israeli strategists took that verse and made it policy: if the state believes it is about to fall, it will not fall alone. Seymour Hersh put the name in public in 1991. Ben-Gurion, Peres, Eshkol, and Dayan had already been living inside the idea since the mid-1960s. The bomb in the basement was never only a shield. It was a threat to bring the house down.
That is the piece of the nuclear age the Non-Proliferation Treaty was written to forbid, and the piece Washington spent sixty years pretending not to see.
Israel never signed the NPT. It is the only nuclear-armed state that still refuses to admit it is one. The official line, coined under Levi Eshkol, is that Israel “will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East.” The unstated second clause has always been that it will not be the second, either. Avner Cohen called the posture amimut — opacity. Golda Meir and Richard Nixon sealed it in 1969. Don’t ask. Don’t tell. Let Dimona pass as a research reactor. Don’t inspect the halls that make the warheads. Don’t put Israel in the same sentence as India and Pakistan. The result is an arsenal estimated by the Federation of American Scientists and SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) at about ninety warheads, with fissile material for more, deliverable by missile, aircraft, and submarine — a second strike after the country itself is ash or an increasingly likely first strike based on the intensifying mantra of eternal victimhood. Other estimates have run much higher. The precise number is a secret the United States agreed to keep. The species does not get a briefing.
Mordechai Vanunu, the technician who walked out of Dimona and told the Sunday Times in 1986 what the plant was for, paid for that briefing with years in a cell. Hersh documented how the secret was shared, sanctioned, and willfully ignored from Eisenhower forward. U-2s photographed the Negev site. Inspectors were walked through false walls. U.S. presidents discovered that “not the first to introduce” was a legal formula and chose the formula. That is not ambiguity. That is a license.
The Begin Doctrine is the other half of the same policy. No other state in the region is to possess what Israel already possesses. Menachem Begin made the rule public in June 1981, when Israeli aircraft destroyed Iraq’s Osirak reactor and he declared that Israel would not accept weapons of mass destruction in the hands of hostile states. The Security Council condemned the attack. The United States learned to accommodate it. In 2007 the same logic was applied to the al-Kibar site in Syria. Under Netanyahu the doctrine became a sustained campaign against Iran’s nuclear program: the killing of scientists, cyber sabotage, and, in June 2025, a twelve-day air operation — Rising Lion — against Natanz, Isfahan and Tehran, joined by U.S. strikes on Fordow and other sites still under IAEA safeguards. It was the first time a nuclear-armed state, acting with another, struck another country’s safeguarded enrichment complex on that scale. Iran is to be stopped from “introducing” a weapon Israel assembled decades ago and still will not acknowledge. The last resort, if prevention fails or if the state judges its survival at stake — a judgment never limited to literal invasion — is Samson: nuclear use against a non-nuclear adversary rather than accept defeat. Kelsey Davenport of the Arms Control Association has put the distinction plainly. The option is not built to deter a nuclear first strike. It is built so that Israel is not defeated.
That is sold as a second strike: the country in ruins, the submarines still out, the last blow after the last blow has landed. Eternal victimhood collapses the sequence. If every political defeat is Auschwitz, if recognition of Palestine is “sheer madness,” if an ICC warrant is antisemitism, if a Houthi missile or an Iranian centrifuge or a crowd outside the UN is the temple about to fall, then there is no “after.” There is only a first strike rehearsed as self-defense. A state that cannot lose does not wait to be invaded. It names the world an existential threat and keeps the option of going first while calling the option last.
Hannibal is the precursor. On 7 October 2023 the directive — stop an abduction even if the captive dies — was put into practice. Haaretz, Yedioth Ahronoth, later IDF probes, and former defense minister Yoav Gallant established that units were told to halt vehicles heading for Gaza. Helicopters were over the Nova festival near Re’im. A UN commission found indications Hannibal was used that morning and that aircraft at the site may have fired on the ground, including civilian cars. How many of the dead were killed by Israeli fire is still disputed. The rule is not. Better an Israeli corpse than an Israeli in Gaza. A government that will do that to its own at a rave will not treat the warheads as ornaments when it decides the story is defeat. It is not afraid of the lunatic plan. It has already run the small version. Samson is the same order written for a region and the world at large.
The doctrine is not sitting in a drawer. It is the backdrop to a war that has already jumped borders. The United States and Israel opened a direct campaign against Iran. The Houthis, who had paused after the Gaza ceasefire, resumed ballistic launches at Israel in March 2026. By autumn Yemen was back in full war. Houthi forces took the Red Sea coast, Perim Island, and the approaches to Bab al-Mandab while Iran’s pressure on Hormuz sent energy prices through another ceiling. Child malnutrition is rising. Trump talks of more strikes after the midterms and of annihilating the Islamic Republic. This is a widening fire under two chokepoints, with a nuclear monopoly in the basement and a last-resort doctrine that treats defeat — including, in some readings, the end of occupation or even expansion — as the cue to pull the pillars.
The people who protected that basement were never only generals in the Negev. Hersh’s Samson Option named Robert Maxwell and Nicholas Davies at the Daily Mirror as part of the net that helped Mossad find Mordechai Vanunu in London in 1986. Maxwell sued. Maxwell died. The Mirror group later settled and paid Hersh. The bomb’s first public witness was kidnapped. The media owner on the British end of the story was the father of Ghislaine Maxwell. Jeffrey Epstein’s operation — the island, the traffic in girls, the photographs, the men and women of power who flew and forgot — is the same caste in another register: kompromat as foreign policy. Ari Ben-Menashe and others have alleged that both Maxwells and Epstein sat inside Israeli military-intelligence work. Those claims remain contested. What is not contested is Hersh’s pattern: the nuclear secret was defended by fixers who treated law as optional and editors, presidents, and children as inventory.
A nuclear-armed ethnocracy that will not admit the arsenal, will not join the NPT, will not accept an ICC warrant, and will fight from Gaza to Tehran to the Red Sea is not a debate topic. It is a condition — tanker rates, famine maps, a podium that says annihilate. Last week Trump asked the General Assembly whether he should strike a deal with Iran or drive the Islamic Republic into hell. Netanyahu arrived two days later on the Wing of Zion, through the airspace of Rome Statute states, under a November 2024 ICC warrant for starvation as a method of warfare and crimes against humanity in Gaza. The two speeches are part of the same chapter. Annihilation is ordinary speech. Samson is that speech with a delivery system and an exemption from the treaty written to forbid it.
Ninety warheads will not, by themselves, end the human species. The United States, Russia and China still hold the inventory that can. That is the circuit, not a comfort. Hersh reported that Israeli doctrine once included holding the Soviet Union at risk because a regional last resort was designed to threaten general war. A detonation in the eastern Mediterranean or the Gulf is not a local incident.
Tucker Carlson told NPR that in the Oval Office, days before that war opened, he warned Trump the campaign was not about centrifuges — that Israel was pushing it. Carlson says Trump answered: “Yes, you’re right. But in the end we all die anyway, so it doesn’t matter.” The White House did not confirm the exchange. Carlson called it nihilism. Left to interpretation, it is a president treating the species as already spent while the client’s last-resort doctrine sits in the basement. Climate collapse is the slow extinction measured in degrees. Nuclear psychosis is the fast one still called a rumor as a favor. Both are existential. Only one remains unofficial.
Zionism needs the Book of Judges the way an occupation needs a deed. The plane is named for a wing of Zion. The bomb is named for a suicide that kills the room. Hannibal is the same sentence at the scale of a car on the Gaza border. Jewish Voice for Peace and clergy arrested outside the UN are the rebuttal in flesh: the religion is not the arsenal. The arsenal belongs to a genocidal colonial state that has made “existential threat” mean any future in which Palestinians remain — and that has reserved the right, if that future arrives, to take the region and quite likely the world, with it.
The governments that cleared the sky for the Wing of Zion and sanctioned Francesca Albanese for writing genocide are the same governments that call Dimona a rumor. They will not disarm Israel. They will not admit the bombs exist. They will not apply the NPT. They will keep the temple standing until someone, in a panic rehearsed for seventy years, decides the pillars are the only move left.
Hannibal is the proof of intent. Nova was the field test. Samson is the same order if the field is the region they call Judea and Samaria. The arsenal exists. The exemptions are American and Russian and British and European. Epstein and the Maxwells showed the other hold — dirt, silence, men who do not expect a court. No file in public ties the island to a launch key. The system does not need that file. Opacity, last resort, and a political class that can be ruined by a photograph are enough. The sentence is unchanged: let me die with the Philistines. Now the Philistines are whoever is under the aircraft and whoever is downwind. All of us are in the temple. They call the roof deterrence.
