ISRAEL, SOUTH AFRICA & THE SHADOW NUCLEAR ALLIANCE
During the Cold War, while the world was distracted by East and West, another alliance quietly took shape at the far end of the map, between Israel and apartheid-era South Africa.
Two pariah states, both isolated, both seeking self-reliance, and both obsessed with the same ambition: nuclear deterrence.
Israel provided advanced missile technology; the blueprints that would become South Africa’s RSA rockets, near-identical to Israel’s Jericho systems.
In return, South Africa supplied what Israel lacked: vast quantities of uranium ore, the fuel for Dimona’s hidden reactor.
Declassified South African minutes from 1975 even recorded Shimon Peres offering “three sizes” of warheads to P.W. Botha — language so blunt that Israel later claimed it was mistranslated.
Four years later, in 1979, a U.S. satellite detected a mysterious double flash over the South Atlantic, still officially unexplained, yet many analysts believe it was a joint Israeli–South African nuclear test.
And right in the middle of this shadow network came Jonathan Pollard, a U.S. Navy intelligence officer turned Israeli spy.
In 1984–85 he stole thousands of top-secret documents including satellite data, Soviet and Arab nuclear intelligence, and possibly information relating to South Africa’s weapons program.
He wasn’t spying for money alone; he was feeding a state that had built its survival on nuclear ambiguity and strategic deception.
By 1991, South Africa dismantled its six nuclear bombs and opened its program to international inspectors; the only nation ever to do so.
But Israel never followed suit. It kept its arsenal, its silence, and its Samson-style promise of annihilation if ever cornered.
The two programs may have parted ways, but the pattern remains: secrecy, blackmail, deterrence and the quiet understanding that what was forged in the shadows still shapes the balance of fear today.
The Samson Option is Israel’s undeclared nuclear deterrence strategy, named after the biblical figure Samson who brought down the Philistine temple on himself and his enemies.
First publicly outlined by journalist Seymour Hersh in his 1991 book “The Samson Option”, it refers to a deliberate policy of massive nuclear retaliation as a “last resort” if the state’s existence is ever existentially threatened.
Essentially, if Israel faces imminent destruction by conventional or unconventional forces, it would unleash its full nuclear arsenal (estimated at 80–400 warheads) not just against direct aggressors but potentially against major enemy cities and even allied or neutral capitals across the Middle East, Europe, and the former Soviet Union.
The doctrine, is intended to make any attempt at annihilation prohibitively costly: “Never again” means Israel would rather trigger a regional or global catastrophe—pulling everyone down with it—than allow a second Jewish genocide.
Though never officially confirmed by Israeli leaders, figures such as Martin van Creveld and Ephraim Inbar have openly discussed it, and statements from officials like Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, and more recently Naftali Bennett have hinted at the willingness to use “all means” in extremis.
The strategy relies on ambiguity, second-strike capability (via Jericho missiles, Dolphin-class submarines, and airborne delivery), and the psychological deterrent of mutually assured destruction applied asymmetrically.
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