On October 21, 1994, the United States and North Korea signed an agreement at Geneva known as the Agreed Framework, and a crisis that had brought the two countries close to conflict was eased. Under the terms, North Korea was to freeze the operation of its reactor at Yongbyon and to give up the larger reactor programme it had been building, and it was to remain a party to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. In return the United States was to arrange the supply of heavy fuel oil and to lead a group that would build two light water reactors.
The crisis had grown through 1993 and 1994, when North Korea announced it would withdraw from the treaty and refused inspections, and the United States and its partners pressed for access to the sites. The talks were hard. The former president Jimmy Carter travelled to Pyongyang in June 1994 and met Kim Il-sung, and that visit helped open the way to talks, and Kim died in July, which added uncertainty. The talks in Geneva ran through the summer and autumn.
The agreement held for several years. The oil flowed. The reactors were begun, though construction was slow and the promised completion date slipped, and the two sides argued about inspections and about the missile tests carried out by the North. The framework was already in trouble when the United States said in 2002 that the North had admitted running a secret programme to enrich uranium, and the oil shipments were stopped, and the North restarted its plant and left the treaty in 2003.
The reactors were never finished, and the site where they were being built was later dismantled. The deal failed. The framework is studied as an example of a deal that froze a nuclear programme without ending it, and the crisis it addressed returned in the following decade. Talks in the 2000s produced other agreements, which also broke down, and North Korea tested a nuclear device in 2006 and again in later years.