In the event of an Indo-Pak nuclear war, India will emerge the ultimate “winner” after wiping off Pakistan but lose up to 500 million of its own people, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian Taylor Branch has claimed in his 700-page book The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President which hit the stores today.

The casual manner in which Indians and Pakistanis spoke of a nuclear war scenario alarmed Bill Clinton, the then US President, who admitted “they really talk that way”.

Branch claims Indian leaders had portrayed such a scenario during the 1999 Kargil conflict to Clinton who was ready to “jump on a plane” to prevent its escalation into a full-fledged nuclear war as Pakistan, fearing military defeat, had almost prepared itself to nuke India.

The portion on nuclear warfare appears in the chapter Eight Missiles in Baghdad in which the author claims Clinton told him that New Delhi would nuke Pakistan, annihilating the entire country if anyone in Islamabad triggered nuclear bombs against it.

“He called this the one region on the globe

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India, Pak painted n-war scenarios during Kargil: book quotes Clinton

facing a serious threat of nuclear war between two nations, India and Pakistan. Their mutual enmity was historically constant, yet chillingly erratic,” Branch writes.

“In private, he (Clinton) disclosed, Indian officials spoke of knowing roughly how many nuclear bombs the Pakistanis possessed, from which they calculated that a doomsday nuclear volley would kill 300 to 500 million Indians while annihilating all 120 million Pakistanis. The Indians would thus claim “victory” on the strength of several hundred million countrymen they figured would be left over.”

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