In his hotel room in Vienna, Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon sat tensed waiting for the outcome of the plenary session of the 45-member Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) on September 6. He was conscious of the irony. The NSG was formed in 1974 as part of an angry reaction to India's first nuclear test. Now it was meeting to make a special amendment in its rules that would allow its members to trade with the very country that the group had been set up to isolate. Around noon, Menon got three simultaneous SMSs from negotiators inside, simply stating: "We have done it". He savoured the moment and his first reaction was, as he later told India Today, "We had finally ended the nuclear apartheid that we had faced for 34 years. We were free at last." Menon was soon on the line to Delhi along with Shyam Saran, a former foreign secretary and the prime minister's special envoy. They first spoke to the prime minister who had been anxiously watching television flashes of news coming from the NSG deliberations in Vienna at his residence at Race Course Road. Manmohan Singh congratulated the team describing it as a momentous day. Then the two informed External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee who was equally jubilant. Manmohan was soon on the line complimenting Mukherjee who replied, "It is really your brainchild." Later that day, Manmohan spoke to US President George W. Bush and thanked him for his "strong leadership" that helped see the deal through. In doing so, India and the US had pulled off what was considered impossible. Signed in July 2005, the Indo-US civilian nuclear agreement was the boldest foreign policy gamble to radically transform relations between them. To do so, the US decided to remove the single biggest irritant: India's nuclear ambition. The US had led the world in building a technology denial regime to isolate India. Now in order to dismantle the fortress, the US would first have to amend its own laws that prohibited trade with countries that hadn't signed the NPT. The enabling legislation for such a waiver became the controversial Hyde Act. It was followed by the bilateral 123 Agreement that laid down the framework for civilian nuclear trade between the two countries. But the deal floundered after the Left parties, then a constituent of the ruling UPA, raised serious objections and walked out of the coalition. That forced a trust vote in August which the Manmohan Government narrowly won. Meanwhile, as part of the deal India had agreed to separate its civilian reactors from those it designated as military and bring these in phases under permanent safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Delhi then signed an India-specific protocol with the IAEA at record speed with the US providing "helping muscle" as one diplomat put it. The hardest part both India and the US knew was to convince NSG members, many of them the ayatollahs of nonproliferation, to amend its rules. Under the deal, America would shepherd the deal through the NSG. India, since it wasn't a member of the group, was forced to watch from the sidelines, as Menon was doing that morning. The previous two days had seen a hard-fought battle that whittled down the naysayers to just four