Kamikaze Kamikaze was a word of Japan ese origin that translated to " Divine Wind " . The kamikaze became famous in World War II , where Allied forces used the term to refer to Japanese pilots who made suicide runs , flying planes loaded with explosives into Allied ships . It was sometimes employed by starship s , usually as an attack of desperation . " In an alternate reality created by Nero ' s arrival in 2233 , George Kirk , acting captain of the , made a kamikaze attack on Nero ' s ship , the " Narada " , once the crew were safely away in shuttles . " ( ) In 2256 , Captain Philippa Georgiou intended to pilot a worker bee carrying a photon torpedo warhead into the " Sarcophagus " . The tactic became unnecessary after another means of delivering the warhead availed itself . ( ) In 2267 , Commodore Matt Decker piloted into the mouth of the planet killer , attempting to destroy it after it had killed the crew of his ship , the . Decker was killed , but the explosion briefly caused damage to the interior of the machine , allowing James T . Kirk to devise a way of disabling it with a larger explosion . ( ) In 2367 , Captain William T . Riker was prepared to ram the into a Borg cube that was attempting to assimilate Earth , but Lieutenant Commander Data was able to take control of the Borg ' s regeneration cycle and cause the cube to self - destruct . ( ) In 2370 , a Jem ' Hadar attack ship collided with the ' s deflector dish , causing its destruction . Despite the fact that the " Odyssey " was withdrawing from the battle , the Jem ' Hadar made the suicide run to prove to the Federation how far they were willing to go to prevent others from interfering with the Dominion . ( ) In 2371 , Chakotay initiated a collision course against a Kazon carrier vessel aboard his Maquis raider , the " Val Jean " . ( ) In 2373 , at the Battle of Sector 001 , Lieutenant Commander Worf intended to ram the into the Borg cube after taking severe damage . The timely arrival of the prevented him from doing so . ( ) In 2374 , during the first Battle of Chin ' toka , the severely outnumbered Jem ' Hadar defenders employed kamikaze attacks against invading Klingon forces , destroying or crippling fifteen ships . ( ) " Also in late - 2374 of an alternate timeline , the performed a kamikaze move against the Krenim weapon ship , causing the destruction of her vessel . The collision caused catastrophic damage to the ship ' s temporal core and instigated a temporal incursion upon the weapon ship itself , and the ship and all associated events were erased from history . " ( ) In 2379 , during the Battle of the Bassen Rift , Captain Picard ordered the into a collision course with Shinzon ' s " Scimitar " after conventional weapons were exhausted . Once the vessels were entangled , he intended to destroy both with the " Enterprise " s autodestruct . However , the autodestruct system was damaged in the collision and the " Scimitar " was able to pull itself free . ( ) Apocrypha . In the novel " A Rock and a Hard Place " by Peter David , Picard is outraged by the actions of a maverick officer temporarily filling in for Will Riker ; when Deanna Troi tells Picard that , as far as she can sense , the officer is not mentally unbalanced , Picard describes " kamikaze " pilots in Earth ' s history , saying that the pilots somehow entered a state of mind where they felt it was quite rational to fly their planes into explosive crashes .