Kim will find it hard to pursue twin goals at once

Besides officially crowning Kim Jong-un as supreme leader, the just-concluded party congress of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea offered the rest of the world a rare glimpse of the country's actual policy orientations.

In contrast to the past months of harsh, sometimes intimidating, rhetoric regarding its pursuit of nuclear weapons and relations with Seoul and Washington, Pyongyang sounded impressively less-aggressive, even reconciliatory at the congress.

But Kim's assertion that the DPRK is a "responsible nuclear state" may ring hollow outside Pyongyang, because, suspicions about its nuclear capabilities aside, few would embrace it as a responsible nuclear power.