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........

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