In May 1990, then-U.S. President George H.W. Bush was convinced that Pakistan was poised to use a covert nuclear weapon capability against India. The impending apocalypse—which would have dwarfed Hiroshima and Nagasaki—had to be prevented at all costs. Consequently, the White House dispatched a trusted emissary, Robert Gates (a man who would later become U.S. Defense Secretary in the George W. Bush and Obama administrations) on a top secret mission to South Asia—first to Pakistan and then to India. Eventually on May 21, 1990, it was concluded that the Gates mission had indeed succeeded and, paradoxically, the sense that the...