  A new experiemntal program to study hadron production in hadron-nucleus and
nucleus-nucleus collisions at the CERN SPS has been recently proposed by the
NA49-future collaboration. The physics goals of the program are: (i) search for
the critical point of strongly interacting matter and a study of the properties
of the onset of deconfinemnt in nucleus-nucleus collisions, (ii) measurements
of correlations, fluctuations and hadron spectra at high transverse momentum in
proton-nucleus collisions needed as for better understanding of nucleus-nucleus
results, (iii) measurements of hadron production in hadron-nucleus interactions
needed for neutrino (T2K) and cosmic-ray (Pierre Auger Observatory and KASCADE)
expriments. The physics of the nucleus-nucleus program is reviewed in this
presentation.
