India-Pak were on brink of nuclear war: Mike Pompeo

Former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo wrote in a book, published on Tuesday, that India and Pakistan came close to nuclear war in 2019 and that US intervention prevented escalation. Pic/AFP

Mike Pompeo, former US secretary of state, wrote in a book published on Wednesday that India and Pakistan had come close to nuclear war in 2019 and that US intervention prevented escalation.

"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," the likely future presidential contender wrote in "Never Give an Inch," his memoir of his time as Donald Trump's top diplomat and earlier CIA chief.

India in February 2019 broke precedent by launching airstrikes inside Pakistani territory after blaming a terrorist group there for a suicide bombing that killed 41 CRPF jawans in Kashmir. India shot down an F-16 during an aerial combat in which an Indian warplane was shot down by Pakistan and the pilot was captured by them.

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Pompeo, who was in Hanoi for a summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, said he was woken up with an urgent call from a senior Indian official. "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 said that US diplomats convinced both India and Pakistan that neither was preparing to go nuclear. "No other nation could have done what we did that night to avoid a horrible outcome," Pompeo wrote.

Pompeo, who wrote that Pakistan "probably enabled" the Kashmir attack, said he spoke to "the actual leader of Pakistan," then army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa, in an allusion to the weakness of civilian governments.

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