Wikipedia:
The term 'Samson Option' comes from the biblical story of Samson, who broke the columns supporting the roof of the temple to bring it crashing down on the heads of his enemies. This action is often used as an analogy for an action that brings victory at great cost.
Deterrence Doctrine
The original conception of the Samson Option was only as deterrence. According to US 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 the Biblical figure Samson, who pushed apart the pillars of a Philistine temple, bringing down the roof and killing himself and thousands of Philistines who had gathered to see him humiliated. They contrasted it with the ancient siege of Masada where 936 Jewish Sicarii greatly outnumbered by Roman legions committed mass suicide rather than be defeated and enslaved by the Romans.
Although nuclear weapons were viewed as the ultimate guarantor of Israeli security, as early as the 1960s the country avoided building its military around them, instead pursuing absolute conventional superiority so as to forestall a last resort nuclear engagement.
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.'
Louis René Beres, a professor of Political Science at Purdue University, chaired Project Daniel, a group advising Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, argues in that paper and elsewhere that the effective deterrence of the Samson Option would be increased by ending the policy of nuclear ambiguity. In a 2004 article he recommends Israel use the Samson Option threat to 'support conventional preemptions' against enemy nuclear and non-nuclear assets because 'without such weapons, Israel, having to rely entirely upon non-nuclear forces, might not be able to deter enemy retaliations for the Israeli preemptive strike.'
In 2003, Martin van Creveld, a professor of military history at Israel’s Hebrew University, thought that the Al-Aqsa Intifada then in progress threatened Israel's existence. Van Creveld was quoted in David Hirst's 'The Gun and the Olive Branch' (2003) as saying 'I consider it all hopeless at this point... We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen, before Israel goes under.' He quoted General Moshe Dayan: 'Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.'
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