Is Israel Preparing Nuclear Bombs for Iran According to “The Samson Option”?

Story of Samson in Judges chapter 16 in the Old Testament part of the Bible.

by Brian Shilhavy
Health Impact News

Last week, Israeli press reported a 4.2 earthquake in Dimona, near a major nuclear facility.

4.2 magnitude earthquake recorded in southern Israel

The epicentre was registered near a major nuclear facility, but Magen David Adom has confirmed that no injuries have been reported and witness testimony suggests damage in the area was limited

An earthquake measuring 4.2 on the Richter scale has set off alerts in the Dead Sea and southern Negev regions of Israel.

According to the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre, the quake took place around 9am IST (7am GMT) with the epicentre near Dimona.

Dimona is the third largest city in the Negev, with an estimated population of just under 40,000 people, and his home to the Negev Nuclear Research Centre.

One local resident, who left a testimony on the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre’s website, said they felt their bed moving.

Other testimonies included a resident of Beersheba, 49km west from epicenter, who said: “We live on a high floor. We felt the earthquake. The lamps on the ceiling moved.”

One person even reported feeling tremors in Haifa – 192km north-west of the epicentre – saying: “Felt a quake while sitting on my chair. Furniture was shaking lightly.”

Testimonies also came in from nearby Jordan, with a resident of Ma’an, 108km south-east of the epicentre, reporting: “I felt the desk in my office moving side to side for 2 seconds.”

Source.

There has been speculation that what caused the earthquake was a nuclear bomb explosion underground.

Max Blumenthal was interviewed on The Jimmy Dore Show a few days ago where they were discussing the Iran situation, and when he mentioned this earthquake in Dimona within the context of Israel trying to put pressure on Trump to attack Iran, he brought up the topic of “The Samson Option” which has been allegedly used to blackmail U.S. Presidents in the past to gain their military support.

The “Samson Option” is named after the Biblical character of Samson in the Old Testament book of Judges, where Samson committed suicide while also annihilating Israel’s enemies at the same time.

The current day meaning is that Israel would use this option to cause a nuclear war, knowing full well it might destroy their own country.

I saw Blumenthal’s comments in a clip out of the interview, but I watched the entire interview today with Jimmy Dore, and it is well worth watching, and easy to follow along at higher speeds.

The section about the “Samson Option” starts around the 1:23:20 mark.

Here is some more information about the “Samson Option”, which has allegedly been used as a threat to blackmail U.S. Presidents to support Israel since the Nixon years.

The Samson Option (Hebrew: ברירת שמשון, romanized: b’rerat shimshon) is Israel’s deterrence strategy of massive retaliation with nuclear weapons as a “last resort” against a country whose military has invaded and/or destroyed much of Israel.

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.

When the Lehi militant group were discussing ways to assassinate General Evelyn Barker, the British Army commander in Mandatory Palestine, a young woman volunteered to do the assassination as a suicide bombing.

She said “Let my soul die with the Philistines [he]” as a reference to the Samson story in the Hebrew Bible. Other members of the group rejected her offer.

Israel refuses to confirm or deny it has nuclear weapons or to describe how it would use them, a policy of deliberate ambiguity known as “nuclear ambiguity” or “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, and two years later, in 2008, former US president Jimmy Carter stated the number of nuclear weapons held by Israel to be “150 or more”.

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 in euphemisms such as “doomsday weapons” and the Samson Option.

Nevertheless, as early as 1976, the CIA believed that Israel possessed 10 to 20 nuclear weapons. By 2002, it was estimated that the number had increased to between 75 and 200 thermonuclear weapons, each in the multiple-megaton range.

Kenneth S. Brower has estimated as many as 400 nuclear weapons. These can be launched from land, sea and air. This gives Israel a second strike option even if much of the country is destroyed.

In 1991, American investigative journalist and Pulitzer Prize winning political writer Seymour Hersh authored the book Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal & American Foreign Policy.

In the preface of the book he writes: “This is a book about how Israel became a nuclear power in secret. 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.”

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