Rethinking the Samson Option: Abandoning Israeli Nuclear Ambiguity
The October 7 attacks provided a poignant reminder of Israel's insecurity vis-a-vis Iran and its proxies. In response, some have suggested revisiting Israel's longstanding policy of nuclear ambiguity. This would be a mistake. Their logic has intuitive appeal. Israel's current nuclear posture was spectacularly incapable of deterring the Hamas attacks on October 7, as well as subsequent aggression by the Houthis and Hezbollah. Iran's terror axis evidently believes the threshold for Israeli nuclear use is sufficiently high as to permit large-scale (but non-existential) attacks to be carried out against the Jewish State without fear of significant reprisal. Israel's nuclear threshold is thought to be high due to its unwillingness to "be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East". And non-nuclear reprisals are not always a viable alternative: Israel's capacity for conventional retaliation is limited, particularly when political prioriti...