Samson Option

The Samson Option is the name that some military analysts and authors have given to Israel's deterrence strategy of massive retaliation with nuclear weapons as a "last resort" against a country whose military has destroyed much of Israel. Commentators also have employed the term to refer to situations where non-nuclear, non-Israeli actors, have threatened conventional weapons retaliation, such as Yasser Arafat and Hezbollah.

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, crying out "Let me die with the Philistines!" (Judges 16:30).

Israel refuses to confirm or deny 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 describe the country's true nuclear policy definitively, while still allowing Israel to influence the perceptions, strategies and actions of other governments. However, over the years, some Israeli leaders have publicly acknowledged their country's nuclear capability: Ephraim Katzir in 1974, Moshe Dayan in 1981, Shimon Peres in 1998, and Ehud Olmert in 2006.

During his 2006 confirmation hearings before the United States Senate regarding his appointment as George W. Bush's Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates admitted that Israel had nuclear weapons. In his 2008 book The Culture of War, Martin van Creveld, a professor of military history at Israel’s Hebrew University, wrote that since Gates admitted that Israel had nuclear weapons, any talk of Israel's nuclear weapons in Israel can lead to "arrest, trial, and imprisonment." Thus Israeli commentators talk about "doomsday weapons" and the Samson Option.

...
Wikipedia