North Korea is taking an illusionary path, which will take it nowhere, by pledging to bolster its nuclear arsenal and economic growth in parallel. Under guidelines earlier approved by the ruling Workers’ Party, the North’s rubber-stamp parliament on Monday adopted a law formalizing the country’s status as a nuclear weapons state and restored a sacked economic reformer to his previous post as prime minister.

Showing where the weight of the newly professed approach is placed, Pyongyang said the following day it would restart a nuclear reactor and other facilities at the Yongbyon complex, which were shut down under an agreement reached at the six-party talks in 2007. The move would allow it to extract enough weapons-grade plutonium to make a bomb every year.

Wednesday’s measure to ban South Korean workers from entering the inter-Korean industrial park in Gaeseong also suggested that the North was not yet sincere toward boosting its economy and improving its people’s livelihoods. It has yet to be seen how far Pyongyang will go, but the closure of the joint industrial zone, which employs more than 50,000 North Korean workers, is certain to cause more damage to the impoverished regime.

It would be good for North Korea to realize as soon as possible that it is a sheer illusion to plan for rebuilding a tattered economy while holding on to nuclear arms. For an impoverished state like the North, economic growth and nuclear weapons development cannot be compatible goals.

Pyongyang’s propagandists have said the possession of atomic bombs could enable the country to concentrate on economic growth without increasing military spending. But it would still cost the regime a large chunk of its dwindling budget to maintain and improve the reliability of its nuclear arsenal. More decisively, it could not expect to receive assistance and investment from the outside world, which would be essential to boost, or just shore up, its moribund economy, as long as it sticks to nuclear arms programs.

Pyongang’s latest measures followed a series of near-daily threats and acts that have escalated tensions on the Korean Peninsula over the past month. It voided the Korean War Armistice and nonaggression accords it has signed with South Korea and cut off all cross-border hotlines before declaring over the weekend that it was in a “state of war.” But contrary to its anticipation, North Korea’s bellicose rhetoric and behavior have only prompted stronger responses from Seoul and Washington to retaliate sternly against its possible provocations.

The North should realize before it’s too late that its nuclear blackmail could not go along with bids to shore up its collapsing economy and secure its regime itself.