Mike Pompeo says world has ‘no idea’ how close India and Pakistan came to nuclear war

India and Pakistan came to the brink of nuclear war in 2019 and US intervention prevented the situation from escalating, according to the country’s former secretary of state Mike Pompeo.

In his memoir Never Give an Inch, published on Tuesday, the Donald Trump administration official said “no other nation” could have prevented a “horrible outcome” on the night when a series of military incursions led to a surge in tensions between the nuclear-armed neighbours.

“I do not think the world properly knows just how close the India-Pakistan rivalry came to spilling over into a nuclear conflagration in February 2019,” he wrote.