 However, North Korea failed to acquire T-90 since then, as South Korean and Russian governments agreed to cease supplying arms technology to North Korea since 1994.The destruction of Iraqi T-72s by western tanks such as the M1 Abrams during the Gulf War demonstrated the poor combat performance of the older export variants of T-72s against top-of-the-line Western models.North Korea decided to significantly modernize its tank fleet to bridge the performance gap between its Ch'onma-ho MBTs and the South Korean K1 MBTs, which has similar performance to the early models of the American M1 Abrams.