Former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo wrote in his book that India and Pakistan came close to nuclear war in 2019 after the Balakot strike 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 his memoirs of his time as Donald Trump’s top diplomat and earlier CIA chief.
