So I’ve been aware of the “Samson Option” for a long while (bringing the temple down on the heads of everyone with nukes if their survival was threatened) but I didn’t know they actually loaded up 13 planes armed with nukes as a very obvious threat if they didn’t get their military supplied during the Yom Kippur war.

The NATOpedia page is of course not very descriptive of what the intended targets of those nukes would be.

From this thread, there are some jaw-dropping comments (some just taken from the Samson Option Wiki page itself):

If Israel is going down, they’ll launch nukes at uninvolved countries as a punishment for anyone who either wasn’t supportive enough or Muslim since Islam is the ‘enemy.’ It’s a form of nuclear blackmail.

Rosenbaum also opined that in the “aftermath of a second Holocaust”, Israel could “bring down the pillars of the world (attack Moscow and European capitals for instance)” as well as the “holy places of Islam.” and that the “abandonment of proportionality is the essence” of the Samson Option.

Van Creveld was quoted in David Hirst’s The Gun and the Olive Branch (2003) as saying: We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force. Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: ‘Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.’ I consider it all hopeless at this point. We shall have to try to prevent things from coming to that, if at all possible. Our armed forces, however, are not the thirtieth strongest in the world, but rather the second or third. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under.

So what are the odds that the Israelis have been using this threat (or the subtle perception of it) to get what they want all of the time? Because I’m guessing that number is around 100%.