Former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has made a big claim regarding the developments after the surgical strike. Pompeo said that the then External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj told him that Pakistan was preparing for a nuclear strike in the wake of the Balakot surgical strike in February 2019 and that India was preparing its response.
Pompeo wrote these things in his new book ‘Never Give An Inch: Fighting for the America I Love’, which hit the market on Tuesday. He writes that the incident happened while he was in Hanoi for the US North Korea summit on February 27-28. His team worked through the night with both India and Pakistan to defuse the crisis.
Just IN: "Top Indian official woke me up at midnight & told me that Pakistan is about to nuke India."-Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claims about the 2019 India-Pakistan clashes.
— South Asia Index (@SouthAsiaIndex) January 25, 2023
Pompeo writes in his book, ‘ I don’t think the world knows exactly how close the India-Pakistan rivalry came to a nuclear attack in February 2019. The truth is I don’t even know the exact answer, I just know it was pretty close. It may be known that in February 2019, Indian warplanes destroyed the terrorist training camp of Jaish-e-Mohammed in Balakot, Pakistan. This action was taken in response to the martyrdom of 40 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel in the Pulwama terror attack.
Mike Pompeo said he’ll never forget that night. He wrote, ‘I will never forget that night when I was in Hanoi, Vietnam. Talking with the North Koreans on nuclear weapons was not enough. As it were, India and Pakistan started threatening each other in connection with the decades-long dispute over the Kashmir region on the northern border.
The former foreign minister wrote, ‘Woke up to talk with my Indian counterpart in Hanoi. He believed that the Pakistanis had started preparing their nuclear weapons for the attack. He informed me that India is considering its retaliatory action. I told them not to do anything and give us some time to fix everything.
