  We propose the development and construction of a novel muon-ion collider
(MuIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in the USA as an upgrade to
succeed the electron-ion collider (EIC) that is scheduled to commence in the
early 2030s, by a joint effort of the nuclear and particle physics communities.
The BNL facility could accommodate a muon storage beam with an energy up to
about 1~TeV with existing magnet technology. When collided with a 275~GeV
hadron beam, the MuIC center-of-mass energy of about 1~TeV will extend the
kinematic coverage of deep inelastic scattering physics at the EIC (with
polarized beams) by more than an order of magnitude in $Q^2$ and $x$, opening a
new QCD frontier to address many fundamental scientific questions in nuclear
and particle physics. This coverage is comparable to that of the proposed Large
Hadron-Electron Collider (LHeC) at CERN, but with complementary lepton and
hadron kinematics and beam polarization. Additionally, the developmentof a MuIC
at BNL will focus the worldwide R\&D efforts on muon collider technology and
serve as a demonstrator toward a future muon-antimuon collider at {$\mathcal
O$}(10)~TeV energies, which is an attractive option to reach the next high
energy frontier in particle physics at an affordable cost and a smaller
footprint than a future circular hadron collider. We discuss here the possible
design parameters of the MuIC, kinematic coverage, science cases, and detector
design considerations including estimates of resolutions on DIS kinematic
variables. A possible road map toward the future MuIC and muon-antimuon
colliders is also presented.
