The Samson Option is the doctrine of last-resort Israeli nuclear use, and the subject of an assessment John Kiriakou gave during the 2026 Iran war when asked how plausible it was that Israel would resort to nuclear weapons if it were losing.
His condition is the survival of the state rather than the outcome of any particular war. If the Israelis believed “that the state of Israel was untenable” — that Arab or Iranian advances “could lead eventually even to the end of the state of Israel” — then “yes, I think they would use the Samson option.”[1]
What he stresses is that this is a changed position. “I gave an interview yesterday in which I said that even a year ago, I would have said that was ridiculous. It was a doom ideology.”[2] His current answer is unhedged: “I believe the Israelis would carry this out if they really believed they were in threat of collapse. Yes, they would take everybody out with them.”[2]
Pressed on it again in the same period, he put the point as a rule about listening rather than a prediction: “I think that when the Israelis tell us that there’s a Samson option, that we should take them at their word. I I could absolutely see the Israelis going nuclear. Yes.”[3]
What does not trigger it
The condition is narrow, and Kiriakou has twice declined to extend it. Asked during the same weeks about a possible Israeli clash with Turkey, he reported putting the question to two interlocutors who “both looked at each other and they both started smiling” before telling him there would be no hostilities — and that if the Israelis were to attack Turkey, “Turkey would destroy them.”[4] Asked directly whether Israel would then pull the Samson option, his answer was that it would not: Turkey has no interest whatsoever in occupying Israel, and its aim would be “just to bloody Israel’s, you know, face and nose and tell them you stay on your side of the border and we’ll stay on ours.”[5] A beating is not an existential threat, and the doctrine does not reach it.
He also rejected an economic reading of the doctrine. Put to him was the suggestion that the Israeli strike on Iran’s South Pars field — the world’s largest natural gas deposit, shared with Qatar, of which only some facilities caught fire — was a non-nuclear “Samson light”, intended to sink the world economy alongside Israel’s own.[6] Kiriakou did not think so, and his reason came from inside the agency: “one thing I learned about the the Israelis when I was at the agency is they they don’t give a [ __ ] about international oil prices. Because they buy their oil from us or they buy it on the gray market.” Israel gets oil regardless — from the United States, from the Arabs through Cyprus, through a broker, through Switzerland — so an Arab cut-off would make no difference to it, and wrecking the oil market is not a weapon it would be reaching for.[7]
If it happened
Asked what the international community would actually do in response — whether anything beyond strongly worded statements — Kiriakou called it a great question and then answered it pessimistically. One wants to think it is “like a bright red line in the sand”, that the entire world would come together as one, invade Israel, take its government out of commission and put it in the dock at The Hague. “But I’m not so sure.”[8]
The arsenal
Kiriakou notes that Israel “has never acknowledged the existence of a nuclear program or nuclear arsenal,” and gives the analytic estimate as “between 80 and 200 warheads.” His gloss on the range is that the distinction hardly matters: “That’s enough to kill everybody. Everybody.”[9]
The programme itself is treated at the Israeli nuclear program.