Kim Il-sung [SEP] cause of death
, Kim Il-sung collapsed from a sudden heart attack in Hyangsan, at the age of 82. After the heart attack, Kim Jong-il ordered the team of doctors who were constantly at his father's side to leave, and arranged for the country's best doctors to be flown in from Pyongyang. After several hours, the doctors from Pyongyang arrived, but despite their efforts to save him, Kim Il-sung died. After the traditional Confucian Mourning period, his death was declared thirty hours later.
with the fall of its long-time ally the Soviet Union in 1991, followed by the death of Kim Il-sung (1994), several natural disasters, the North Korean famine and economic crisis, all before 1999. These also could have served as motivation for a new method of consolidation of power.
The second strand focuses on internal North Korean politics as the cause for the move to military first politics. When Kim Il-sung died, he left leadership of North Korea to his son, Kim Jong