The South Korea government was still reeling Wednesday after former U.S. President Bill Clinton's surprise visit to North Korea.

A senior government official said, "The worst-case scenario for us would be to see the repetition of the nightmare of 1994." At the time, the South Korean government was completely left out in the cold as the U.S. and North Korea concluded the Geneva Agreed Framework in the wake of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter's visit to Pyongyang.

Under the deal, South Korea had to bear most of the construction costs for a light-water reactor that was to be traded for the North's closure of its plutonium-producing nuclear plant in Yongbyon.

"It's important for us to maintain close cooperation with the U.S. to prevent us from being left out in the cold as in 1994," the official added.

But a Unification Ministry official said a repeat of that disaster is unlikely. "At the moment, North Korea is excited with memories of 1994, but it seems most likely that Clinton's visit was a kind of one-point relief pitch aimed at winning the release of the American journalists. We need to watch how Washington and Pyongyang will go ahead with their dialogue," he said.

His rationale was that Carter visited Pyongyang in 1994 expressly to find a solution to the nuclear issue, while Clinton visited to seek the release of the two U.S. reporters who had been sentenced to hard labor for illegally entering the country.

Especially, the government is concerned about the possibility of the critical public opinion seething over Seoul failing to seek the release of a South Korean man detained at the Kaesong Industrial Complex.

A Cheong Wa Dae official claimed there had been a "sharing of views" between South Korea and the U.S. over humanitarian issues such as the female journalists under detention and the South Korean man held incommunicado at Kaesong before Clinton went to Pyongyang. "I believe there'll also be progress in the issue of the South Korean man under detention," he said.

So far, however, North Korea has said nothing about the man, identified as Yoo, who has been held incommunicado for 129 days, and the crew of a South Korean fishing boat 800 Yeonan towed to the North on July 30.

In a press briefing, the ministry said, "The government is watching closely how the release of the female journalists will affect the issues of the South Korean staffer at Kaesong or the Yeonan. It's still too early to judge what kind of effect their release will have on these issues."