The Islamic regime responded to international condemnation that it clandestinely built a facility in mountain tunnels near the holy city of Qom by saying that international monitors would be allowed to visit the site.
The gesture by the country's atomic chief Ali Akbar Salehi seemed designed to head off calls for new economic sanctions as world powers prepare to meet Iranian negotiators for talks in Geneva this week on its disputed nuclear programme. But he offered no timetable for the visit, leaving open the possibility that Iran might remove incriminating evidence from the installation, which is on military land, before the nuclear inspectors visit.
President Barack Obama and David Miliband, the foreign secretary, raised the spectre of fresh sanctions after the US, UK and France disclosed the existence of the plant which could produce material for an atomic bomb or nuclear energy.
Mr Salehi said that Iran was constructing the facility as a "precautionary measure" in case of a military strike against its exisiting uranium enrichment plant at Natanz. That location had also been built in secret but was uncovered in 2002.
As the fall-out from the revelations intensified, The Sunday Telegraph has learned that Western intelligence is focussing on five other suspected clandestine sites that officials believe could be part of a hidden nuclear fuel cycle.
"For the secret uranium enrichment plant at Qom to be put into action, there would also have to be a source of converted uranium to provide the feedstuff," said a Western intelligence official.
The existing conversion plant at Isfahan, which supplies Natanz, is under monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). It would be extremely risky and difficult for the Iranians to seek to divert supplies from Isfahan when Qom became operational.
"So it is clear that Iran must also be working on a clandestine conversion facility," the official said. "It would make no sense to have one without the other. It was the same thinking that resulted in us identifying the Qom site after Natanz was uncovered."
In a series of interviews in New York after his trip to the United Nations, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad insisted Iran had not needed to inform the world atomic agency about Qom as it was more than six months from coming on line. He repeated that the nuclear programme was for civilian energy purposes.
But in more threatening rhetoric, Mohammad Mohammedi-Golpayegani, who heads the office of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini, declared: "The new plant, God willing, will soon become operational and will make the enemies blind."
In his weekly presidential address, Mr Obama said the discovery of a secret nuclear plant showed a "disturbing pattern" of evasion by Tehran which "added urgency" to its talks this week with the US, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China.
Russia has also signalled a greater willingness to go along with sanctions but China remained the major obstacle, saying it favoured a "dual track" approach of pressure and talks.
Mr Miliband underscored what was at stake in Geneva. "The Oct 1 meeting was always going to be important, it is now doubly so," he told The Sunday Telegraph. "The world will be watching to see whether Iran is serious about engaging with the international community.
"If they want to be treated like a responsible member of that community, they need to behave like one. We have made it very clear that this is not a question of whether Iran has the same rights as other members of the international community, but whether it accepts its responsibilities."
Before Friday's announcement by President Barack Obama, flanked by Gordon Brown, the prime minister, and President Nicolas Sarokozy, at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, three days of behind-the-scenes drama and diplomacy played out at the UN.
More than 100 world leaders had gathered for the annual General Assembly when US officials learned that Iran had written a short and cryptic letter to IAEA revealing a previously undeclared small "pilot" nuclear facility.
US intelligence had learned about the underground site in 2006. And working with their British and French counterparts, they compiled a detailed picture of what was being built there, with information from a Iranian nuclear scientist's smugggled laptop, defectors and satellite imagery.
Iran, they learned, was constructing a plant that could house 3,000 centrifuges for enriching uranium - material that can be used for civilian energy purposes or for atomic warheads.
On Monday, Tehran wrote to the IAEA with partial and misleading information about the Qom facility after learning that the West knew of its existence. So Mr Obama's team decided to go public with what it knew, to outflank Iran.
Over a two-day period, US, British and French officials briefed their Russian, Chinese, Israeli and UN counterparts. Mr Obama personally told President Dmitry Medvedev during one-to-one talks, after which the Russian leader emerged sounding tougher on sanctions.
This was followed by harsh words on Iran from Mr Brown and Mr Sarkozy at a meeting on nuclear disarmament on Thursday, and then the showpiece announcement on Friday morning in Pittsburgh.
"It was always an option to go public on this at some stage soon," a senior Western official told The Sunday Telegraph. "We wanted to see if they would come even half-clean about this. But when they wrote to the IAEA to announce a small so-called pilot project, we decided to go for it. They were clearly completely taken by surprise."
He dismissed Iranian suggestions that the site could have a non-military use. "The killer argument is the size and scale of this facility. It is much to big to be a pilot and much too small to be of any civilian use," he said.
Alleged secret sites for another stage of the bomb-making process - weaponisation - were identified by an Iranian opposition group last week. The National Council of Resistance of Iran, which the regime calls a terrorist organisation, said it has identified two sites in and near Tehran where scientists are developing detonators for nuclear weapons.
Israel greeted the Qom revelations as a vindication of its insistence that Iran is developing a nuclear bomb, but also a sign that time is running out to act..
"It's almost certain that there are other clandestine sites so we really don't know what stockpiles they already have," Dore Gold, a former advisor to prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and [a former] ambassador to the UN, told The Sunday Telegraph.
"But we do know that the timeline is very tight and Iran may be much further down the road to the bomb than some people thing," said Mr Gold, author of the newly-published The Rise of Nuclear Iran. "This really is five minutes to midnight."
Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister, demanded harsh new sanctions, saying: "Without wasting time, we must work towards the overthrow of the mad regime in Tehran."
But despite the hawkishness of Mr Netanyahu's government, the disclosure appeared to reduce the likelihood of an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear installations.
"This is going to push back any possibility of a unilateral strike," said Meir Javedanfar, a prominent Iranian-Israeli analyst and author of a book of Iran under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
"Israel will be far more integrated into the negotiations. The more Israel is included, the less likely the Israeli leadership is to act unilaterally."
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