India and Pakistan came close to a nuclear war in 2019 and Washington's intervention prevented an escalation, former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reveals in his memoir published on Tuesday.
This happened in February 2019 after New Delhi launched air raids inside Pakistani territory after blaming an armed group there for a suicide bombing that killed 41 Indian soldiers in disputed Kashmir region. In response to the attack, Islamabad shot down an Indian warplane, capturing the pilot, Abhinandan Varthaman.
India's aerial attacks across the Line of Control (LoC) dividing Indian and Pakistan in Kashmir were the first since a war in 1971. India said it had killed a large number of militants but Pakistan called the claim "reckless".
"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," Pompeo said.
Pompeo, who served as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency from January 2017 and April 2018 and then as secretary of state from April 2018 to the conclusion of Trump's term in January 2021, wrote this in his book, "Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love."
Pompeo describes the episode
Pompeo, who was in Hanoi, Vietnam, for a summit between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, said he was awakened to speak with his then-Indian counterpart Sushma Swaraj.
"He believed the Pakistanis had begun to prepare their nuclear weapons for a strike. India, he informed me, was contemplating its own escalation," Pompeo wrote. "I asked him to do nothing and give us a minute to sort things out," Pompeo said.
Pompeo stated that he immediately began working with then-National Security Advisor John Bolton, who was also in Hanoi and spoke to "the actual leader of Pakistan", the then-army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa.
"As one might expect, he believed the Indians were preparing their nuclear weapons for deployment. It took us a few hours - and remarkably good work by our teams on the ground in New Delhi and Islamabad - to convince each side that the other was not preparing for nuclear war," he added.
"No other nation could have done what we did that night to avoid a horrible outcome," Pompeo wrote.
Neither India nor Pakistan has commented so far on Mr Pompeo's claims, according to BBC.
Nuclear weapons
Pakistan and India are two of only a few countries with nuclear weapons.
In 1974, India became the first country in the region to acquire nuclear weapons, encouraging Islamabad to follow suit. In the 1980s, when it was an ally of the US in the first Afghan war against the collapsing Soviet Union, Pakistan developed its own nuclear capacity.
On May 11 and 13, 1998, India conducted a total of five underground nuclear tests, breaking a 24-year self-imposed moratorium on nuclear testing. Pakistan followed with 5 tests on May 28, 1998, and an additional test on May 30.
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