"... Press statements are not the same thing as formal notifications, but the notifications should be arriving in Vienna shortly, if they haven’t already. If five sites really have already been selected, then undeclared plans to build them have been in place for awhile. Judging by how the Iranian side has framed its activities at Qom, construction may already have been underway for some time.
One way to see it, then, is that the Iranian side has seized the opportunity to get tough by coming clean, or to come clean by getting tough. In the two-level game of international diplomacy and Iranian domestic politics, this sort of Janus-faced response may be as close to a win-win outcome as ever happens....
Whether Iran has been planning or preparing more hidden enrichment plants and other fuel cycle facilities is a separate question, though. We’ll probably have a better understanding in the coming weeks and months.
If Qom is any example, the doubts expressed in the NIE had less to do with not knowing the whereabouts of the covert facilities, and more to do with doubts about the exact purposes of the facilities under observation. On that point, we might infer from the recent IAEA report and BoG resolution that there has been less doubt lately.
Viewed in this light, Iran’s “defiant” disclosure might be a voluntary foreclosure of its ability — probably already compromised — to use a network of covert sites to build the Bomb. If that’s so, then intelligence has secured some of the margin of security that negotiations seemingly could not."
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