The Samson Option is the name that some military analysts and authors have given to Israel's strategy of mass-murdering non-Jews with nuclear weapons if Israel is destroyed.
According to United States 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 Samson from the Hebrew Bible, 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 as retribution for his Jewish mass-murders of non-Jewish people.
Seymour Hersh’s 1991 book The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy described the extreme efforts of the Kennedy Administration to force Israel to allow International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections of Israel's nuclear facility at Dimona and thereby prevent its use in producing nuclear weapons.
The pressure and financial aid threats secretly applied to Israel by the Kennedy Administration eventually became so severe that they led to the resignation of Israel’s founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in June 1963. But all these efforts were almost entirely halted or reversed once Kennedy was murdered and replaced by Johnson in November of that same year.
