  This talk discusses some recent studies of gluon saturation in nuclei. We
stress the connection between the initial condition in heavy ion collisions and
observables in deep inelastic scattering (DIS). The dominant degree of freedom
in the small x nuclear wavefunction is a nonperturbatively strong classical
gluon field, which determines the initial condition for the glasma fields in
the initial stages of a heavy ion collision. A correlator of Wilson lines from
the same classical fields, known as the dipole cross section, can be used to
compute many inclusive and exclusive observables in DIS.
