  The Color Glass Condensate (CGC), describing the physics of the nonlinear
gluonic interactions of QCD at high energy, provides a consistent
first-principles framework to understand the initial conditions of heavy ion
collisions. This talk reviews some aspects of the initial conditions at RHIC
and discusses implications for LHC heavy ion phenomenology. The CGC provides a
way compute bulk particle production and understand recent experimental
observations of long range rapidity correlations in terms of the classical
glasma field in the early stages of the collision.
