Samson option

The Samson Option is a popular Israeli term for a nuclear deterrent in terms of massive retaliation .

The term alludes to the biblical figure of Samson , who went down with his opponents. This option is said to have been considered for the first time during the 1973 Yom Kippur War , when the Israeli military found itself on the defensive following the initial successes of an attacking military alliance of Arab states and the state feared for its very existence. Seymour Hersh alleged in 1991 that then Prime Minister Golda Meir, at the urging of Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, gave the order to clear 13 atomic bombs, speculating that this threat of a nuclear escalation moved the US to turn Israel in the conflict over war materials support. In a video released in 2013, an adviser to Minister Israel Galili said that on October 7, 1973, Dajan pushed for nuclear weapons to be made ready for action, but Meir refused to do so.

See also

• Israeli nuclear weapons

literature

• Seymour Hersh : The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. Random House, 1991, ISBN 0-394-57006-5

Web links

• Israel: Strategic Doctrine on GlobalSecurity.org

Footnotes

1. ^ Seymour Hersh: The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. Random House 1991, p. 225
2. ^ Avner Cohen, When Israel Stepped Back From the Brink . In: The New York Times . 3rd October 2013
3. ↑ Mitch Ginsburg: "Dayan pushed PM Meir to consider using nuclear weapons in 1973" . In: The Times of Israel. 3rd October 2013