[1] Commentators also have employed the term to refer to situations where non-nuclear, non-Israeli actors have threatened conventional weapons retaliation.
[8][9] 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.
It also tells how that secret was shared, sanctioned, and, at times, willfully ignored by the top political and military officials of the United States since the Eisenhower years."
While outnumbered, Israel effectively eliminated the Egyptian Air Force and occupied the Sinai, winning the war before the test could even be set up.
[26][27][28][29][30] Seymour Hersh writes that the "surprising victory of Menachem Begin's Likud Party in the May 1977 national elections ... brought to power a government that was even more committed than Labor to the Samson Option and the necessity of an Israeli nuclear arsenal.
"[31] Louis René Beres, a professor of political science at Purdue University, chaired Project Daniel, a group advising Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
He argues in the Final Report of Project Daniel and elsewhere that the effective deterrence of the Samson Option would be increased by ending the policy of nuclear ambiguity.
It would well understand the formidable nature of the demon and keep it locked in the basement"In 2002, the Los Angeles Times published an opinion piece by Louisiana State University professor David Perlmutter.
[35]In his 2012 book How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III, the American Jewish author Ron Rosenbaum described this opinion piece as "goes so far as to justify a Samson Option approach".
[36] In that book, Rosenbaum also opined that in the "aftermath of a second Holocaust", Israel could "bring down the pillars of the world (attack Moscow and European capitals for instance)" as well as the "holy places of Islam."
[dubious – discuss][37] In 2003, a military historian, Martin van Creveld, thought that the Second Intifada then in progress threatened Israel's existence.
[38] Van Creveld was quoted in David Hirst's The Gun and the Olive Branch (2003) as saying: We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome.
Israeli poet and Holocaust survivor Itamar Yaoz-Kest published a poem entitled "The Right to Exist: a Poem-Letter to the German Author" which addresses Grass by name.