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I. Introduction: Why 1994, and Why Now?

Following the U.S. military operation against Iran in February 2026, South Korean security discourse has been structured around two central questions. The first is: 'Is North Korea the next target?'[1] This question ultimately leads to a conclusion that negates the possibility of an attack on North Korea, on the grounds of (1) North Korea's possession of nuclear weapons, (2) the absence of a regional 'rogue actor' comparable to Israel, (3) the possibility of Chinese and Russian military intervention, and (4) the limits of U.S. war-fighting capacity. The second question is: 'Does the U.S.-Israel joint military campaign against Iran constitute a case in which alliance commitments have been operationalized on the battlefield, and how might this apply to South Korea?'[2] However, rather than proceeding to a rigorous analysis of the fundamental differences between South Korea and Israel, or between the security environments of North Korea and Iran, these questions tend to remain at the level of normative declarations that South Korea and the U.S. must respond in a manner that is closely coordinated and highly calibrated.

In the early 1990s and 2000s, when North Korea had yet to acquire nuclear weapons, the United States did not strike North Korea militarily. On the contrary, during that very period it waged the Gulf War against Iraq, a far more militarily capable adversary. The explanation that 'it cannot be attacked because it has nuclear weapons' may be true per se, but when viewed in its historical context, the causal sequence is inverted. Of the more than thirty years during which the North Korean nuclear crisis has persisted, it possessed no nuclear weapons for approximately the first twenty.[3] The logic that nuclear possession functions as a deterrent is either merely a contributing factor to the lack of military strikes from the U.S., or more accurately, a post-hoc rationalization that mistakes effect for cause. The more fundamental reason lies elsewhere. For the United States, the North Korean problem is not a Korean Peninsula security issue; it is a subordinate component of the Northeast Asian security structure—and, specifically, of U.S. strategy toward China. South Korean nuclear discourse has long overlooked or evaded this structural reality.

This paper revisits the 1994 Yongbyon crisis as a first point of inquiry into the origins of this asymmetric perception. The prevailing narrative runs as follows: North Korea pressed ahead with nuclear development; the United States prepared a precision strike on Yongbyon; the firm opposition of President Kim Young-sam and the visit to Pyongyang by former President Carter forestalled a war; and the Geneva Agreed Framework was ultimately concluded. This narrative has circulated as received wisdom for over thirty years. Yet when this episode is reexamined through the lens of each actor's interests and structural conditions, an entirely different picture emerges.

II. The Existing Narrative and Its Gaps

The existing account of the 1994 Yongbyon crisis rests on three core propositions. First, the United States genuinely possessed both the will and the plan to strike Yongbyon. Second, Kim Young-sam prevented the strike, thereby averting war. Third, Carter's visit to Pyongyang served as the decisive turning point that led to the Geneva Agreed Framework. This narrative has been reproduced repeatedly through the memoirs and testimonies of the principals involved. Wit, Poneman, and Gallucci—direct participants in the negotiations—emphasize that the war crisis of that period was real.[4] Former President Kim Young-sam likewise recounts in his memoirs that he personally stopped the United States from bombing North Korea.[5] Yet this narrative contains unexplained gaps. The factor most commonly cited as having constrained U.S. military action is the capability of North Korea's long-range artillery to strike Seoul and the risk of escalation to an all-out war. Secretary of Defense Perry reported to Clinton that a strike on Yongbyon would result in 'tens of thousands of casualties in Seoul within the first few days,'[6] while Commander of U.S. Forces Korea General Luck estimated that, should the conflict escalate to an all-out war, total casualties would reach 'the scale of one million.'[7] The gap between these two figures is abnormally large. Given that these figures pertain to the exact same event, the vast discrepancy between 'tens of thousands' and 'one million' casualties strongly suggests the estimates were strategically calibrated to suit differing political contexts.

More decisive is Perry's own subsequent testimony. He stated: 'The contingency plan for striking the Yongbyon nuclear facility was in my desk drawer, but it was neither reported to the President nor placed on the table.'[8] The fact that casualty estimates were reported to the President while the strike plan itself remained only in a drawer strongly suggests that the figures were utilized not for the purposes of actual military planning, but to serve other political ends.

Furthermore, for both the narrative that 'Kim Young-sam prevented the strike' and the narrative that 'Carter resolved it' to be held simultaneously, the premise that the United States was genuinely intent on striking North Korea's nuclear facilities is needed. Yet the moment that premise is accepted, the narrative that 'Kim Young-sam prevented the strike' collapses, and the moment it is rejected, the narrative that 'Carter was decisive' is undermined. In other words, if the United States had truly intended to carry out the strike, it would have been difficult for Kim Young-sam to stop it through a telephone call alone; conversely, if the United States' original plan was coercive diplomacy or bluffing—of a kind that Kim Young-sam could stop—then Carter's visit to Pyongyang should be regarded not as a 'decisive' inflection point, but as one component of an overarching U.S. strategy. To fill these gaps, we must first establish how genuinely threatening North Korea actually was at the time, and what purpose the possibility of a U.S. 'military attack' was actually intended to serve.

III. The Actual Situation: An Isolated North Korea and an Orchestrated Crisis

1. The Simultaneous Disappearance of Strategic Patrons

North Korea's structural conditions in 1994 are unambiguous. Its strategic patrons had simultaneously withdrawn their traditional support. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 created a decisive vacuum in North Korea's security environment. The automatic military intervention clause of the 1961 Soviet-North Korean Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance was rendered a dead letter when Russia downgraded its relationship with North Korea to a 'normal state relationship' in 1992. Russia was at the time mired in the chaos of a severe systemic transition, and declassified documents demonstrate that Russia had absolutely no intention of supporting or enabling North Korean adventurism during this period.[9]

In the same year, the establishment of Sino-South Korean diplomatic relations formalized China's strategic distancing from North Korea. For China, which was devoting all its energies to economic reform and opening following Deng Xiaoping's Southern Tour, North Korean adventurism represented a threat to its own development strategy.[10] The very fact that the North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs formally submitted a letter of protest against Sino-South Korean normalization itself indicates that Pyongyang had acknowledged the disappearance of China's willingness to provide military support.[11]

2. The Collapse of Substantive War-Fighting Capacity

The withdrawal of patron states entailed decisive material consequences. Supplies of Soviet-manufactured equipment and spare parts were severed, and energy imports declined by approximately 90% relative to 1990 levels by 1994.[12] Testimonies from North Korean military defectors consistently confirm that poor maintenance and parts shortages were severe across the North Korean military as a whole during this period.[13] The extreme food shortages that led to what became known as the 'Arduous March' require no further elaboration.

In other words, in 1994, North Korea had neither Chinese nor Russian support. It also had no independent war-fighting capability, and was therefore incapable of choosing war. North Korea's so-called 'Sea of Fire' threat was less an expression of genuine offensive intent than an asymmetric bluff employed by a regime on the verge of collapse. It would indeed be more appropriate to regard precisely such a situation—in which conventional deterrence had crumbled—as the explanation for why North Korea subsequently pursued nuclear weapons. Furthermore, the shock of the 1991 Gulf War would only have reinforced this pursuit.

3. Structural Constraints on Long-Range Artillery Deterrence

The dispersal and concealment tactics of long-range artillery presuppose adequate vehicles and fuel, as well as a fully functioning command-and-control network. As confirmed above, the collapse of the energy supply chain and the severing of Soviet spare parts supplies structurally undermined these tactical prerequisites. Moreover, given that a significant portion of the long-range artillery would in all likelihood be preemptively neutralized in an actual operational scenario, the substantive retaliatory capacity was probably considerably lower than previously estimated.

Counterarguments are of course possible. A prominent counterargument is the claim that one should not underestimate the threat posed by long-range artillery, citing the precedent that, during the 1991 Gulf War, the United States ultimately failed to completely eliminate Iraq's Scud missiles.[14] However, it has since been established that the combat capabilities of the Iraqi military prior to the Gulf War were considerably overstated by U.S. intelligence agencies, and that such exaggeration was utilized to secure congressional authorization for the war.

4. The RSOI Paradox: Military Deployment or Orchestrated Negotiation?

Given that North Korea's internal and external conditions were as described, another method of verifying the claim that the United States genuinely intended to strike is to examine the manner in which U.S. forces were deployed.

Noteworthy is the three-phase reinforcement plan that the U.S. Department of Defense reportedly pursued. A public RSOI (Reception, Staging, Onward movement, and Integration) deployment conducted over a period of several months fundamentally contradicts the doctrine of preemptive surprise strikes. In the theory of coercive diplomacy, of course, the public deployment of forces is itself a central instrument. During the Gulf War, the United States publicly assembled its forces over a period of months as well before commencing actual operations as a surprise strike. Theoretically, public assembly and a surprise execution are compatible.

However, if one accepts the U.S. assessment of North Korea's artillery threat, a paradox emerges: a highly public force build-up would have signaled an imminent strike, potentially prompting Pyongyang to preemptively deploy its artillery. In such a scenario, the RSOI process would have structurally undermined the effectiveness of the very strike it was preparing for. In this respect, the public nature of an RSOI conducted over several months more naturally coheres with the hypothesis of coercive diplomacy aimed at negotiating pressure rather than actual strikes. This is also consistent with Perry's testimony cited earlier—that '(the plan to attack the Yongbyon nuclear facility) was neither reported to the President nor placed on the table.' The fact that forces were being publicly reinforced while the strike plan was simultaneously not being reported to the supreme decision-maker strengthens the interpretation that the RSOI served not as actual operational preparation but as an instrument of negotiating pressure.

These three analyses—North Korea's structural vulnerability, the exaggeration of long-range artillery deterrence, and the public nature of the RSOI—do not individually constitute decisive evidence. Read cumulatively, however, they point toward a single coherent interpretation: that the U.S. military build-up was not an operational deployment aimed at actually striking North Korea, but a visual performance of coercive diplomacy oriented toward negotiation. This interpretation possesses far greater explanatory power than the narrative that North Korea—in a dual structural crisis of extreme economic collapse and the simultaneous loss of its patron states—actually deterred the world's most powerful military through long-range artillery alone.

IV. Why the Divergence Arose: The Structure of Threat Exaggeration and the Dual-Track Strategy

1. Structural Necessity: What Was North Korea to the United States?

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, U.S. foreign strategy faced a fundamental legitimacy crisis. With the primary adversary of the Cold War gone, the rationale for the continued presence of U.S. forces in East Asia required redefinition. At that time, the U.S. economic relationship with China was expanding and deepening, and it was difficult, at least in the short term, to officially designate it as a direct military threat or a potential hegemonic competitor. Yet given the uncertainty as to which direction China's trajectory would take, it was equally impossible to preemptively withdraw from the Korean Peninsula and Japan. Maintaining forward-deployed forces in East Asia was a cornerstone of the United States' long-term strategy toward China.

Within this structure, North Korea occupied a very particular functional position. Were North Korea to collapse or reunification to be realized, the justification for the presence of U.S. Forces Korea would potentially be fundamentally weakened. Consequently, were U.S. Forces Korea to disappear, the rationale for the presence of U.S. Forces Japan could be sequentially destabilized as well. What the United States needed, in the end, was to maintain North Korea as a threat sufficiently severe to justify its military posture—while ensuring it did not actually collapse or achieve unification. Only when this condition was satisfied could the United States newly legitimize the stationing of its military forces in the region without bearing the burden of directly targeting China.

Hawkish voices existed both within the United States and within South Korea. In Congress, amendments calling for military action were passed, and the media extensively covered the North Korean threat. However, these hard-line positions were separate from the level at which actual policy decisions were made. As Perry's testimony demonstrates, the Yongbyon bombing plan never reached Clinton's desk. Thus, hard-line positions were utilized in the service of the United States' higher-order strategic objectives—not a variable that determined them.

2. Actor-Level Interests: How Threat Exaggeration Operated

If the aforementioned structural necessity of the United States laid the foundation for threat exaggeration, each actor reinforced that tendency for its own reasons. However, in order to understand these actor-level interests, one core condition must first be established. The United States' dual-track strategy could only function if its true intentions remained unread by both allies and adversaries.

Were South Korea to learn of the United States' broader design—that it intended to exploit rather than eliminate the North Korean threat—it could have called into question the justification for the presence of U.S. Forces Korea. Were North Korea to grasp the United States' actual intentions, furthermore, the negotiating leverage would never have been established in the first place. The United States therefore had to manage South Korea's independent actions by projecting an image that a strike was under serious consideration while simultaneously exaggerating the scale of damage such a strike would cause; toward North Korea, it had to orchestrate military pressure while simultaneously keeping an exit open through informal channels. This multiplicity constituted the essence of the strategy designed to construct a new East Asian security architecture predicated on U.S. strategy toward China.

Behind this structure, actor-level interests also operated. For the Clinton administration, the exaggeration of the North Korean threat served three purposes. First, it provided domestic justification for the enormous costs of aid to North Korea (KEDO, light-water reactors, heavy fuel oil). In order to sustain the logic that the 'cost of peace' was cheaper than the 'cost of war,' the cost of war had to be presented as sufficiently high.[15] Second, for Clinton—who from the outset of his administration faced skepticism from the U.S. military due to allegations of draft evasion—the narrative that he had seriously considered a military option served as an instrument for demonstrating decisiveness as commander-in-chief. Facing political adversity from the failure of healthcare reform ahead of the November 1994 midterm elections, tangible achievements in foreign and security policy could have been of assistance. Third, for the U.S. military, which was facing pressure for defense budget cuts following the end of the Cold War, presenting the North Korean threat in enlarged terms provided a direct basis for justifying the maintenance of forces stationed on the Korean Peninsula and the deployment of new weapons systems such as the Patriot missile.[16]

Moreover, North Korea benefited from having its threat capability exaggerated in terms of negotiating leverage. South Korea was no exception. The larger the threat, the more the legitimacy of the security cooperation framework was reinforced, and the more likely it was that a leader's 'decisive stand for peace against a great power's aggressive intent' would be regarded as a political achievement.

In the end, each actor inflated the threat for its own reasons. This was not the result of a prearranged conspiracy. However, within the structure that U.S. strategy had created, the rational behavior of each actor pointed in the same direction.

3. The Execution of the Dual-Track Strategy: Managing South Korea and Engineering the Exit

The exaggeration of the threat and the engineering of the exit negotiation were not separate events, but two axes of a single strategy. The United States, on one side, rendered military tension visible to pressure North Korea and control South Korea; and on the other side, it quietly kept a negotiating exit open through informal channels. Only when both axes operated simultaneously was the strategy complete, and the true intentions of that strategy could not be exposed to either side.

The official narrative holds that the United States intended to strike North Korea, and that Kim Young-sam stopped it. However, this narrative explains only one aspect, or the surface, of the situation at the time. In reality, voices advocating for a Yongbyon strike existed on both the U.S. and South Korean sides. Oberdorfer wrote that the United States was gravely concerned about the possibility of South Korea acting unilaterally at the time.[17] In relevant diplomatic cables from WikiLeaks, U.S. diplomats repeatedly referred to the South Korean government's hawkish stance on North Korea as 'something to be managed.'[18] Declassified records of the Clinton-Kim Young-sam telephone conversations also show that South Korea adopted the more hard-line position. In a June 1994 telephone conversation, Kim Young-sam urged immediate sanctions—a harder policy than that of the United States—while Clinton moderated the pace on the grounds of building international justification. In an October conversation of the same year, Kim Young-sam publicly criticized the U.S. approach to North Korea as 'naive and concession-oriented,' to which Clinton responded with fury.[19]

In reality, South Korea's posture at the time was characterized by an inconsistent oscillation between exaggerated anxiety and vague hawkishness, stemming primarily from an inability to decipher true U.S. intentions. President Kim Young-sam himself, while warning Ambassador Laney that 'if the United States bombs North Korea, South Korea will be devastated immediately,' simultaneously maintained a publicly hard-line position to the effect that 'one cannot shake hands with those who possess nuclear weapons.'[20]

The essence of the situation at the time lies in the fact that the United States halted its own offensive maneuver, and that the United States' strategic intent to this effect had to be kept thoroughly concealed even from its ally, South Korea. In the midst of North Korea's rapid national decline and famine, the imposition of sanctions or the use of military force carried the substantial risk of triggering an uncontrollable North Korean collapse. The possibility of North Korea's collapse was a matter that could shake the very foundations of the East Asian security structure that the United States had pursued.

Given the structural conditions of North Korea discussed above—the disappearance of patron states, the collapse of war-fighting capacity, and the extreme food crisis—it was practically impossible for North Korea to refuse a negotiating exit once one was opened. The United States was aware of this. Clinton allowed Carter to visit Pyongyang on the explicit condition that Carter would travel in a personal, non-governmental capacity. To dismiss Carter's personal-capacity visit as a deviation from official diplomacy is shortsighted. The fact that Clinton authorized Carter's visit under the explicit condition that it be in a personal capacity suggests that a certain degree of coordination existed between the two. In diplomatic systems, the operation of sensitive informal channels is generally shared only among the smallest number at the very top. The critical views of Carter expressed by some U.S. diplomats in WikiLeaks are more appropriately read not as a response to Carter's unilateral actions, but as bureaucratic resistance to results having emerged outside the control of the State Department.

Indeed, immediately following Carter's visit to Pyongyang, Clinton directly discussed with Kim Young-sam how to domestically justify the aid to North Korea that would lead to the Geneva Agreed Framework.[21] At this juncture, the higher-order objective of U.S. strategy toward China and the specific unfolding of the 1994 Yongbyon crisis converge into one. What the United States needed was neither to collapse North Korea nor to entirely neglect it. A rapid change in the North Korean regime could compel a restructuring of the East Asian security architecture, potentially weakening or eliminating the basis for the presence of U.S. military forces. The orchestration of military tension and the opening of a negotiating exit through Carter were precisely the means by which this objective—maintaining North Korea in a state of manageable threat—was to be achieved. Through the narrative of crisis exaggeration and its resolution, the United States concealed its intentions from South Korea while simultaneously incorporating the appearance of coordination with South Korea into the actual resolution process, thereby advancing its own purposes.

V. Conclusion

The reason that the dominant narrative of the 1994 Yongbyon crisis has gone uncorrected for over thirty years is not simple incompetence or negligence. It is because, within the existing structure, virtually no actor with an interest in revising the narrative was to be found. For the United States, this narrative is a historical asset that supports the legitimacy of alliance management and North Korea policy. For the South Korean government, it is a narrative that confirms the legitimacy of security dependence and the historical achievements of individual leaders. For North Korea, furthermore, it serves as a justification strengthening the legitimacy of nuclear development. All parties derive significant strategic dividends from this narrative.

The more fundamental problem, however, is not whether the narrative is corrected. The problem lies in the level at which South Korean security discourse has remained over the thirty years of the repetition of this narrative. South Korean analysis has consistently been fixated on threat (perception). The questions that lie above this level—what structural and functional significance North Korea holds for great powers, in whose interests agreements have been designed, what the actual red lines are, and from whose perspective they have been set—are structurally under-examined in South Korean security discourse. This cannot simply be reduced to a matter of individual analysts' capabilities. As long as a threat-perception-centered framework predominates, focusing on tactical calculations below the level of military operations while missing the structure of great-power strategic competition above it is inevitable.

In the end, the genuine question that the 1994 Yongbyon crisis poses to us today, thirty years later, is not simply the truth or falsity of a past narrative. Rather, it more closely resembles a painful reflection on the degree to which South Korean security discourse has secured an independent perspective within the immense structure of the alliance. South Korean security discourse must now advance beyond the stage of cataloguing North Korean threats toward a deeper consideration of how to define and realize our strategic autonomy within the rapidly shifting East Asian security landscape. The act of rereading the record of 1994 ought to be not a negation of the past, but an effort to prepare a new architecture of security by directly confronting the asymmetry of the alliance we face.

References

Bacevich, Andrew. The New American Militarism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Cho Bi-yeon. ‘Implications of the U.S.–Israel Military Operation Against Iran.’ Sejong Policy Brief No. 2026-18. Sejong Institute, 2026. [Korean]

Cho Gap-je and Kim Pil-jae. ‘Kim Young-sam’s Opposition to the Bombing of North Korea in June 1994: Korea Missed an Opportunity!’ NewDaily, January 7, 2016. [Korean]

Chung, Jae Ho. Between Ally and Partner: Korea-China Relations and the United States. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

Gause, Ken E. North Korean Civil-Military Trends. Carlisle: Strategic Studies Institute, 2006.

Han Sung-Joo. ‘Living History: U.S.-ROK Allied Coordination in Negotiating the 1994 Agreed Framework.’ CSIS Beyond Parallel, December 5, 2016. https://beyondparallel.csis.org/living-history-han-sung-joo/.

Han Sung-joo. The Path of Diplomacy. Seoul: Ollim, 2023. [Korean]

Keaney, Thomas A., and Eliot A. Cohen. Gulf War Air Power Survey Summary Report. Washington: USAF, 1993.

Kim Young-sam. Memoir of President Kim Young-sam. Seoul: Chosun Ilbo, 2001. [Korean]

Mazarr, Michael. North Korea and the Bomb. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.

Moon Chung-in. ‘Four Reasons North Korea Cannot Be the Next Target.’ Hankyoreh, March 23, 2026. [Korean]

National Security Archive. ‘The North Korean Nuclear Crisis, 1994.’ Electronic Briefing Book. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu.

Noland, Marcus, Sherman Robinson, and Tao Wang. ‘Famine in North Korea: Causes and Cures.’ Economic Development and Cultural Change 49(4), 2001.

Oberdorfer, Don, and Robert Carlin. The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History. 3rd ed. New York: Basic Books, 2014.

Perry, William J. My Journey at the Nuclear Brink. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015.

Sigal, Leon V. Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.

Talbott, Strobe. The Russia Hand. New York: Random House, 2002.

Wallander, Celeste A. ‘Lost and Found: Gorbachev’s Perestroika and the End of the Soviet Empire.’ In The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

WikiLeaks Cablegate Database. https://wikileaks.org/plusd.

Wit, Joel S., Daniel B. Poneman, and Robert L. Gallucci. Going Critical: The First North Korean Nuclear Crisis. Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2004.

[1] Moon Chung-in, "Four Reasons North Korea Cannot Be the Next Target," Hankyoreh, March 23, 2026, https://www.hani.co.kr/arti/opinion/column/1250537.html (accessed April 18, 2026).

[2] Cho Bi-yeon, "Implications of the U.S.-Israel Military Operation Against Iran: Battlefield Changes and the Role of the Alliance," Sejong Policy Brief, No. 2026-18, Sejong Institute, April 13, 2026, https://www.sejong.org/web/boad/1/egoread.php?bd=3&itm=&txt=&pg=26&seq=12883 (accessed April 18, 2026).

[3] It is generally assessed that North Korea secured meaningful nuclear warhead capability only after its second nuclear test in 2009.

[4] Joel S. Wit, Daniel B. Poneman, and Robert L. Gallucci, Going Critical: The First North Korean Nuclear Crisis (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2004), pp. 207–240.

[5] Kim Young-sam, Memoir of President Kim Young-sam (Seoul: Chosun Ilbo, 2001). Then-Foreign Minister Han Sung-joo also testified about the crisis situation and the U.S.-ROK consultation process in an oral interview with CSIS Beyond Parallel. Han Sung-Joo, "Living History: U.S.-ROK Allied Coordination in Negotiating the 1994 Agreed Framework," CSIS Beyond Parallel, December 5, 2016, https://beyondparallel.csis.org/living-history-han-sung-joo/.

[6] William J. Perry, My Journey at the Nuclear Brink (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), pp. 105–108; Wit, Poneman, and Gallucci, Going Critical, pp. 207–215.

[7] Don Oberdorfer and Robert Carlin, The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History, 3rd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2014), pp. 326–328; Michael Mazarr, North Korea and the Bomb (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), pp. 178–181.

[8] This statement is re-cited from a KBS news report covering Perry's remarks as introduced in the memoir The Path of Diplomacy (Seoul: Ollim, 2023) by former Foreign Minister Han Sung-joo. KBS, "Kim Young-sam's Opposition to the Bombing of North Korea in June 1994: Did Korea Miss an Opportunity?", https://news.kbs.co.kr/news/pc/view/view.do?ncd=3495438. Perry also testified directly in an interview with SBS: "(I) never proposed (the Yongbyon bombing plan) to President Clinton. I would have proposed it only if diplomacy had failed." SBS, "[World Report] The Truth Behind the 'Yongbyon Bombing Theory'," https://news.sbs.co.kr/news/endPage.do?news_id=N1003297043 (December 3, 2015). This is consistent with the account in Perry, My Journey at the Nuclear Brink, pp. 105–108, where Perry recounts that while the Yongbyon airstrike plan was discussed, the conclusion was a diplomatic resolution.

[9] Celeste A. Wallander, "Lost and Found: Gorbachev's Perestroika and the End of the Soviet Empire," in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 355–377.

[10] Jae Ho Chung, Between Ally and Partner: Korea-China Relations and the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 54–61.

[11] Oberdorfer and Carlin, The Two Koreas, pp. 258–261.

[12] Marcus Noland, Sherman Robinson, and Tao Wang, "Famine in North Korea: Causes and Cures," Economic Development and Cultural Change 49(4), 2001, pp. 741–767.

[13] Ken E. Gause, North Korean Civil-Military Trends (Carlisle: Strategic Studies Institute, 2006), pp. 34–41.

[14] Thomas A. Keaney and Eliot A. Cohen, Gulf War Air Power Survey Summary Report (Washington: USAF, 1993), pp. 81–88.

[15] Leon V. Sigal, Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 156–185.

[16] Andrew Bacevich, The New American Militarism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 126–142.

[17] Oberdorfer and Carlin, The Two Koreas, pp. 336–340.

[18] Based on the WikiLeaks Cablegate Database. https://wikileaks.org/plusd.

[19] National Security Archive, Document No. 02: Memorandum of Telephone Conversation, Clinton–Kim Young Sam, June 22, 1994, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/20408-national-security-archive-doc-02-memorandum; Document No. 08: Memorandum of Telephone Conversation, Clinton–Kim Young Sam, October 14, 1994, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/20414-national-security-archive-doc-08-memorandum.

[20] Kim Young-sam, op. cit.; Cho Gap-je and Kim Pil-jae, "Kim Young-sam's Opposition to the Bombing of North Korea in June 1994: Korea Missed an Opportunity!" NewDaily, January 7, 2016, https://www.newdaily.co.kr/site/data/html/2016/01/07/2016010700015.html (accessed April 18, 2026).

[21] Wit, Poneman, and Gallucci, Going Critical, pp. 215–240; Strobe Talbott, The Russia Hand (New York: Random House, 2002), pp. 131–132.

■ Jaewoo JUN is a Research Fellow at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses (KIDA) .

■ Translated and edited by Sangjun LEE, EAI Research Associate; Inhwan OH, EAI Senior Research Fellow; Sowon KIM, EAI Intern.

    For inquiries: 02 2277 1683 (ext. 211) | leesj@eai.or.kr