The mood was tense in the White House Cabinet room on that summer day, almost exactly 31 years ago.

President Bill Clinton and his National Security Council were about to be briefed by Defense Secretary William Perry, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman John Shalikashvili, and Gen. Gary Luck, the commander of U.S. and allied forces in South Korea, on military options to prevent North Korea from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

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“When the president entered the room, he was much more solemn than usual; indeed, everyone there recognized the gravity of the situation,” Perry wrote five years later in his 1999 book, Preventive Defense. “We were about to give the president the choice between a disastrous option — allowing North Korea to get a nuclear arsenal, which we might have to face someday — and an unpalatable option, blocking this development, but thereby risking a destructive non-nuclear war.”

The object of concern was a nuclear reactor complex near the town of Yongbyon, which North Korea had been building for about a decade and was ostensibly under the watchful eye of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors under terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which North Korea was a signatory.

But North Korea, much like Iran today, was playing cat and mouse with the inspectors, while secretly taking steps to make a future nuclear weapon, including reprocessing spent fuel from the Yongbyon reactor to produce weapon-usable plutonium — enough, U.S. intelligence estimated, to make perhaps one or two atomic bombs.

By June 16, the situation had reached a crisis point.

The Yongbyon reactor was at the end of its initial fuel cycle, and the United States had warned North Korea not to unload its spent fuel rods without IAEA inspectors present.

But North Korea ignored the U.S. and unloaded the rods into a storage pond in a way that would obscure from the inspectors exactly how the reactor had been operated.

And if the spent fuel was reprocessed, it could yield enough plutonium to make an additional five or six bombs.

The U.S. broke off negotiations.

“We had no choice,” said Robert Gallucci, who, at the time, was the chief U.S. negotiator with North Korea. “We had warned the North Koreans not to do something, and they quite deliberately did it.”

“We seemed to be headed more on a road to war than we did on a road to a negotiated end to the conflict,” Gallucci said in a 2003 interview for the PBS documentary series Frontline. “That was a very tense time.”

In yet another parallel to today, North Korea was pretending to negotiate while steadily, covertly making progress toward developing nuclear weapons.

At the time, I was CNN’s military affairs correspondent, and I had been advised privately by a senior Air Force general that plans had been drawn up for a military strike to take out the Yongbyon reactor with a combination of F-117 stealth fighter-bombers and sea-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles.

The U.S. had not yet developed the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, a 30,000-pound bunker-busting bomb used against Iran’s nuclear facility, but the Yongbyon plant was above ground and therefore vulnerable to air attack.

Still, the Defense Department was under no illusion that the military option would halt North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.

“No one thought that this would stop the North Korean nuclear weapons program,” Gallucci said. “The idea would be to hurt them, so they’d come back to the negotiating table. It could easily have led to a war, by miscalculation, or by the North Koreans preferring the uncertainty of a conflict to the certainty of enormous concessions.”

There was uncertainty in the U.S. as well, even fear of a possible nuclear exchange.

“The intelligence community’s judgment was that it was more likely than not that North Korea had one, or possibly two nuclear weapons,” Gallucci said. “We didn’t know.”

Luck had advised that if North Korea did have a nuclear weapon or two, it might “add to the carnage, but not change the eventual result, namely, the defeat of North Korea,” Perry wrote in his book.

That June day, Perry was in the middle briefing Clinton on “OPLAN 5027,” the U.S. war plan for the defense of South Korea, when something happened that would derail further consideration of the military options.

Gallucci was called out of the Cabinet Room to take a phone call from former President Jimmy Carter, who was in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, on an unofficial two-day visit for talks with the country’s aging leader, Kim Il Sung, the grandfather of current leader Kim Jong Un.

In the call, “Carter describes a possible way out of this situation and a deal that could be made with the North Koreans,” Gallucci said. “Carter also told me that he was about to go on CNN and say what the terms of this would be.”

Carter reached a dramatic breakthrough in a “conversation on one of Kim Il Sung’s yachts,” according to an account published after Carter’s death by Eason Jordan, a CNN vice president who had badgered the former president into allowing him and a CNN cameraman to tag along.

“I asked Carter, who was in his bedroom wearing pajamas, to share his big news with the world immediately by doing a live phone interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer,” Jordan recalled. “While Blitzer questioned Carter from the White House lawn, Clinton administration officials huddled around TVs fuming because they had been upstaged by Carter, who shared the news with CNN and the world.”

“It wasn’t only that Carter had freelanced,” Gallucci later recalled. “But it was also, to some degree, boxing in the sitting president, President Clinton.”

With a possible peace deal on the table, announced on CNN by Carter, Clinton could hardly authorize a military strike that might very well provoke North Korea into sending its million-man army south or carrying out its repeated threats to use its hundreds of artillery pieces hidden along the demilitarized zone to turn Seoul into a “lake of fire.”

Especially considering that Pentagon planners estimated that a second Korean War would result in as many as 1 million military and civilian casualties on both sides.

Clinton agreed to the Carter deal, in which North Korea would freeze all activities at Yongbyon, while negotiating a permanent agreement to end its nuclear weapons program.

The resultant agreement, known as the Agreed Framework, provided that the U.S., South Korea, and Japan would provide two light-water nuclear reactors for power generation that would not be capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium.

The window for military action had, for all practical purposes, closed.

“Americans have no idea how close we came to war,” my Air Force general source told me later.

The Agreed Framework was the first of five major formal nuclear and missile agreements with North Korea, all of which proved fleeting when they eventually collapsed.

The U.S. was convinced Pyongyang was cheating, continuing its nuclear program away from Yongbyon, until on Oct. 9, 2006, North Korea tested its first nuclear device.

The nuclear genie was out of the bottle, never to be put back in.

Instead, North Korea dangled the prospect of denuclearization to extract more concessions from the West, including removal of the U.S.’s Trading with the Enemy Act and State Sponsors of Terrorism designations, fuel oil, and food aid.

It is, of course, unknowable what course events might have taken had Clinton ordered the strike on Yongbyon the summer of 1994, whether the show of force would have dealt a death blow to North Korea’s nuclear ambitions or simply reinforced the regime’s belief that the only true deterrence against attack from the U.S. would be to have a nuclear capability that couldn’t be ignored.

The two crises, separated by three decades, are not perfectly analogous — the risk of all-out war on the Korean Peninsula carried far greater risk in the 1990s, compared to Iran’s weakened state in 2025.

But history offers several lessons: that a single military strike is unlikely to stop a determined regime from pursuing nuclear weapons, that unfettered access by international inspectors is vital to ensuring that the effort doesn’t continue covertly, and that once a nation joins the nuclear club, it is loath to give it up.

“Really, [the Iranians] have a fundamental decision to make: Do we want to join the community of nations, be a prosperous country in the Middle East, or do we want to continue on this, I think, futile path that they’ve been on?” Sen. Angus King (I-ME) said on CNN.

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“They can react in one of two different ways,” King said. “They can say, ‘This was pretty bad. Let’s give this up. We can get sanctions. We can get some money. We can become a normal country and move forward.’ Or they can look at Kim Jong Un and say, ‘We need an insurance policy. We’d better race to a bomb.’”

As President Donald Trump is fond of saying when confronted with dicey situations, “We’ll see what happens.”