  We review a consistent description of the fusion and saturation of partons in
the Lorentz-contracted ultrarelativistic nuclei in terms of a nuclear
attenuation of color dipole states of the photon and collective
Weizs\"acker-Williams (WW) gluon structure function of a nucleus. Diffractive
DIS provides a basis for the definition of the WW nuclear glue. The point that
all observables for DIS off nuclei are uniquely calculable in terms of the
nuclear WW glue amounts to a new form of factorization in the saturation
regime.
