Six days or doomsday Israel weighed nuclear option

Israel had a “doomsday” plan to explode a nuclear bomb in Egypt’s Sinai desert if it was losing the Six Day War in 1967, The New York Times reports.

The bomb would have been used to frighten Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Jordan if Israel’s existence was threatened, according to the story told to author Avner Cohen by Yitzhak Yaakov, a retired brigadier general responsible for Israel’s nuclear weapons.

Mr Yaakov, who died in 2013, feared he and his commando team could die in the blast, but Israel won such an unexpectedly quick victory that there was not even the time to move the bomb to Sinai.