Monitoring Desk
WASHINGTON: Ex-US secretary of state Mike Pompeo said that Pakistan and India came close to nuclear war in 2019 and that Washington intervention prevented escalation. The former US secretary of state wrote the remarks in his book published on Tuesday.
Pakistan-India and US
He said, “I do not think the globe properly knows just how close the Pakistan-India rivalry came to spilling over into a nuclear fire in February 2019,”.
India carried out airstrikes and Pakistan shot down an Indian warplane and captured its pilot in February, 2019.
Mike Pompeo said that he was in Hanoi when he was woken up with an urgent call from an Indian official. He claimed, “He (Indian official) believed the Pakistanis had begun to prepare their nuclear arms for a strike. India, he informed me, was considering its own escalation,”.
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Pompeo claimed, “I asked him to do nothing and give us a minute to sort things out,”. He said that US diplomats convinced both Pakistan and India that neither was making preparation to go nuclear.
“No other country could have done what we did that night to avoid a horrible outcome,” Pompeo said.
