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US distances itself from Mike Pompeo's claim that India, Pakistan were on brink of nuclear war

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In his latest book, Mike Pompeo claimed that he was informed that Pakistan was preparing for a nuclear attack in the wake of the Balakot surgical strike in 2019 by Sushma Swaraj.

New Delhi, Jan 26: The United States administration has distanced itself from former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's claim that India and Pakistan came close to nuclear war in 2019 and said that the remark was made by Pompeo as a "private citizen".

Mike Pompeo

When asked about former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's book, State Department spokesperson Ned Price during a regular press briefing on Wednesday responded by saying, "He is expressing the view as a private citizen as his right."

In his latest book, Mike Pompeo claimed that he was informed that Pakistan was preparing for a nuclear attack in the wake of the Balakot surgical strike in 2019 by his then-Indian counterpart Sushma Swaraj who told him that India was contemplating its own escalatory response.

"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 truth is, I don't know precisely the answer either; I just know it was too close," Pompeo writes.

India's warplanes pounded a Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist training camp in Balakot in Pakistan in February 2019 in response to the Pulwama terror attack that killed 40 CRPF jawans.

"I'll never forget the night I was in Hanoi, Vietnam when - as if negotiating with the North Koreans on nuclear weapons wasn't enough - India and Pakistan started threatening each other in connection with a decades-long dispute over the northern border region of Kashmir," Pompeo says.

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"After an Islamist terrorist attack in Kashmir- probably enabled in part by Pakistan's lax counterterror policies - killed forty Indians, India responded with an air strike against terrorists inside Pakistan. The Pakistanis shot down a plane in a subsequent dogfight and kept the Indian pilot prisoner," he said.

"In Hanoi, I was awakened to speak with my Indian counterpart. He believed the Pakistanis had begun to prepare their nuclear weapons for a strike. India, he informed me, was contemplating its own escalation. I asked him to do nothing and give us a minute to sort things out (sic)," Pompeo writes in his book, which wrongly refers to Swaraj as "he".

"I began to work with Ambassador (then National Security Advisor John) Bolton, who was with me in the tiny secure communications facility in our hotel. I reached the actual leader of Pakistan, (Army chief) General (Qamar Javed) Bajwa, with whom I had engaged many times. I told him what the Indians had told me. He said it wasn't true," Pompeo says.

"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," the 59-year-old top former American diplomat wrote in his book.

There was no immediate comment from the Ministry of External Affairs on Pompeo's claims.

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