Samson in the Rubble: The 1991 Book That Explains Israel's Most Dangerous Hour

Israel has spent three years fighting the wars it always warned the world it might one day be forced to fight, and it is learning that it cannot fight them alone. The ceasefire that froze the Gaza war in October 2025 sits over a strip where more than 70,000 Palestinians had been killed by that November and where over two-thirds of the buildings had been damaged or destroyed. To the north, the 2026 Lebanon war has killed more than 4,000 people and driven over a million from their homes. And in February, American and Israeli forces launched close to 900 strikes on Iran in the space of twelve hours, killing the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, along with dozens of officials – and around 170 other people, among them children when a missile struck a girls' school near Bandar Abbas. Iran answered by hitting Israel, striking American bases across the region and closing the Strait of Hormuz. This is what an existential fight looks like when a small country picks confrontations on three fronts at once and then finds it needs a superpower to see them through.

The single load-bearing fact under that whole edifice is American money and American ordnance, and for the first time in living memory it is no longer guaranteed. Which is exactly why Seymour Hersh's The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy, published in 1991 and long out of fashion, now reads less like history than like a briefing note for the crisis unfolding in real time.

The doctrine that gave the book its name

The title is not Hersh's invention. It is Israel's own. In the biblical account, Samson is captured by the Philistines, blinded, and put on display for their entertainment in the temple of Dagon – a temple, as it happens, in Gaza. Granted his strength one last time, he cries 'Let my soul die with the Philistines', pushes the pillars apart, and brings the roof down on himself and his captors together. For the architects of Israel's nuclear programme, Hersh found, that story hardened into strategic doctrine. If the state were ever on the point of being overrun, it would not go quietly into a second Masada, where the ancient Zealots killed only themselves; it would take its enemies down with it. The Samson Option was another way of saying 'never again', with warheads behind it.

That is the cold heart of the book, and it is what makes it so uncomfortable to read this autumn. Israel does not, on Hersh's account, keep its bomb merely to deter a conventional attack. The arsenal is an instrument of last resort, wired directly to the deepest trauma in Jewish history, and its logic runs towards mutual destruction rather than survival at any cost. It is a doctrine designed for precisely the situation Israel's own ministers now describe every day: the nation cornered, its back to the wall, fighting for its life.

What Hersh's sources let him prove

Hersh's achievement was to make the unspeakable a matter of record. His subject was how Israel became a nuclear power in secret, and how that secret was shared, tolerated and, when it suited Washington, deliberately ignored by the most senior figures in American government from the Eisenhower years onward, even as official policy kept up the public pretence that no such arsenal existed. The reporting rested on serving and former American officials, many of whom spoke on the record for the first time about what they had known and when. As Hersh took care to note, these were not enemies of Israel settling scores; several of them supported the bomb and would not have felt safe without it. What they could no longer stomach was the dishonesty of a policy that required their own government to pretend it was in the dark.

Through those sources, Hersh reconstructed the whole hidden architecture. He traced the reactor at Dimona in the Negev desert, built with covert French assistance in the years after Suez and passed off in its early life behind cover stories about textiles and agricultural research. He detailed the reprocessing plant that quietly converted spent fuel into weapons-grade plutonium, the step that turns a research reactor into a bomb factory. And he told, in damning detail, how Israel deceived the American inspection teams that President Kennedy insisted on sending in the 1960s, walling off whole sections of the complex and building a false control room so that visiting scientists went home reassured about a facility they had never really seen. Successive administrations, Hersh's insiders explained, understood roughly what was happening and chose ambiguity anyway, partly because confronting Israel was judged politically impossible and partly because a nuclear Israel was, cynically, useful.

The taboo finally cracked from the inside. Hersh devoted long passages to Mordechai Vanunu, the Dimona technician whose photographs, handed to the Sunday Times in 1986, revealed an arsenal far larger and more sophisticated than Western governments had been willing to admit, with the hallmarks of thermonuclear capability. Vanunu was lured from London to Rome and seized by Mossad for the crime of telling the truth. Hersh also laid bare how far Israeli and American intelligence had grown into one another during the Cold War – the cash that flowed to Mossad, the satellite targeting data that reached Tel Aviv, and the espionage of the American naval analyst Jonathan Pollard, who fed Israel a torrent of classified material. The picture that emerges is not of a client state kept at arm's length but of a partnership so intimate that Washington could no longer see clearly where its own interests ended and Israel's began.

October 1973, and the template for now

The chapter that matters most for the present moment is Hersh's reconstruction of the Yom Kippur war. At its darkest hour, with Syrian armour pouring through the Golan and Egyptian forces across the Suez Canal, the defence minister Moshe Dayan told colleagues that this was 'the end of the Third Temple'. One retired general who sat in on Dayan's censored briefing to editors described a man consumed by despair, talking of collapse and withdrawal. In an all-night session of Golda Meir's inner cabinet, according to the account Hersh assembled from those with knowledge of the room, Israel resolved to do three things at once: rally its shattered forces for a counter-attack, arm and target its nuclear arsenal against the possibility of total defeat, and inform Washington of what it had done while demanding an emergency airlift of arms and ammunition. Warheads were readied on missiles and on specially marked aircraft; the initial target list is said to have included the military headquarters near Cairo and Damascus. The weapons of last resort even carried a code name inside the programme – the 'Temple' weapons. Only the nuclear technicians objected, arguing that the moment for such weapons had not yet come. By then, Hersh reported, Dimona had already built more than twenty warheads.

The alert was not only a defensive measure. It was leverage. Israel used its unprecedented nuclear action, and the peril it advertised, to extract from Richard Nixon the vast resupply airlift that helped turn the war. That is the episode's lesson, and it is the one worth holding up against today's headlines. The Samson Option has always rested on an unspoken assumption: that when Israel reaches its limit, America will answer the call. In 1973 it did, with hundreds of transport flights. The doctrine of mutual destruction was never a doctrine of solitude. It always had a superpower standing just behind it.

Then and now

Read the 1973 chapter beside the events of the past eighteen months and the parallel is impossible to unsee, though the terms have shifted in ways that should frighten anyone who takes the book seriously. In Meir's day, the American backstop was a resupply operation conducted at arm's length, deniable and off the front page. In our decade it has become open co-belligerence. The strikes on Iran's nuclear sites in June 2025, and the far larger campaign in February 2026, were not Israeli operations that Washington blessed from a safe distance; they were joint enterprises, American bombers and Israeli jets prosecuting the same war under twinned code names, Operation Epic Fury for the United States and Operation Roaring Lion for Israel. The backstop has become a front line. The dependence Hersh traced to a single desperate week in 1973 is now the permanent condition of Israel's strategy.

The hypocrisy his sources refused to keep swallowing is intact as well. The United States still will not formally acknowledge that Israel possesses nuclear weapons, even as it flies missions alongside them, and even as it justifies two wars on Iran by the danger of an Iranian bomb while never mentioning in the same breath the one undeclared arsenal that already exists in the region – the arsenal that is the entire subject of Hersh's book, now estimated by independent analysts at around ninety warheads. The asymmetry he anatomised is not a museum piece. It is the organising silence of current American policy.

What has changed, and changed with startling speed, is the politics that once made the whole arrangement untouchable. When Hersh wrote, the cost of confronting Israel in Washington was judged prohibitive. Not any longer. Israel receives $3.8bn in American military aid every year under a ten-year understanding worth $38bn that expires in 2028, and that arrangement is now openly contested on Capitol Hill. In July 2026 more than half of House Democrats voted for an amendment to end the military funding, a measure that only a few years earlier would have been buried by a bipartisan majority without a second thought. In the Senate in April, thirteen centrist Democrats broke ranks to back arms restrictions, several of them citing the war on Iran that Congress had never authorised, among them the reliably pro-Israel Cory Booker. AIPAC-backed candidates have been losing Democratic primaries to challengers who call the Gaza campaign a genocide. The public has run ahead of the politicians: a Quinnipiac poll in June found 48 per cent of Americans saying their government supports Israel too much, and 60 per cent holding an unfavourable view of the country, while a New York Times/Siena survey found nearly three-quarters of Democratic-aligned voters opposed to military aid and 95 per cent opposed to the Iran war. Even the INSS, an Israeli security think tank, warned in the spring that Israel's standing in the United States had become dire and that it risked losing a dependable base of support in either party.

Beyond America, the isolation is nearly total. In September 2025 Britain, France, Canada, Australia and Portugal recognised a Palestinian state within days of one another, joining more than 145 nations that already had. A General Assembly resolution declared Israel's entire presence in the occupied territories unlawful and called on every state to stop assisting it; the International Court of Justice has found a plausible case of genocide and ordered Israel to lift the siege of Gaza, orders that have been ignored. Spain has imposed a full arms embargo and Belgium is moving to follow. Vanunu was imprisoned for revealing the arsenal in 1986; four decades on, the taboo he shattered has collapsed entirely, the bomb is discussed in the open, and yet officially it still does not exist. The dishonesty outlived the men who first practised it.

Here, then, is the question Hersh's forgotten book forces on a reader in 2026, and it is not a comfortable one to sit with. The Samson Option was built for a state facing annihilation at the hands of its enemies. It was never designed for a state being quietly abandoned by its friend – its survival doctrine fully intact, its undeclared arsenal larger than ever, and the American pillar it has leaned on for half a century being pushed away not by Tehran or by Hamas but by American voters and American legislators. Samson, blinded and captive in a temple in Gaza, reached for the pillars when he had nothing left to lose. The unsettling achievement of Hersh's book is to have shown, in the words of the men who built the thing, that Israel deliberately made that impulse into policy. And the frightening thought it leaves behind is that almost no one in Washington, as the money tap edges towards the off position, seems to remember that the option is still on the table.

Richard Powell is an investigative journalist and foreign correspondent of more than twenty-five years. In March 2003 he was on the Iraqi border before the first bomb fell. He is the author of Pariah: How Gaza Broke Israel.