The Kahn nuclear proliferation ring may not be shut down.

The Washington Post today has this disturbing story.

The nuclear smuggling ring headed by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan possessed a broader range of secret nuclear designs than was previously known and shared them electronically among members of the network, a U.N. watchdog group said yesterday.

A report by the International Atomic Energy Agency also acknowledged large gaps in investigators' understanding of the smuggling ring, raising concerns that Khan's nuclear black market may have had additional customers whose identities remain unknown.

"Much of the sensitive information coming from the network existed in electronic form, enabling easier use and dissemination," the Vienna-based agency stated in an internal report, copies of which were obtained by several news outlets and nonprofit groups. Among the key documents, the report said, were instructions for making enriched uranium, and "more disturbingly, information related to nuclear weapons design." U.S. and U.N. officials have previously confirmed that blueprints for at least two types of nuclear weapons were found on computers owned by Swiss businessmen associated with Khan.

So there are very possibly other countries and organizations out there who are working on nuclear weapons that we do not know about.

That's a big problem. I wonder who McCain thinks we should invade to stop the problem.

I also wonder if Cheney and Libby had not outed the CIA agent Valerie Plame and destroyed her networks for their internal conservative political purposes if she could have made more headway on the nonproliferation problem. What they did was Treason against America.