  In high energy nuclear collisions, production rates of light nuclei as well
as those of hadrons and hadronic resonances agree with the predictions of an
ideal gas at a temperature T = 155 +/- 10 MeV. In an equilibrium medium of this
temperature, light nuclei cannot survive. We propose that the observed behavior
is due to an evolution in global non-equilibrium, leading to self-organized
criticality. At the confinement point, the initial quark-gluon medium becomes
quenched by the vacuum, breaking up into all allowed free hadronic and nuclear
mass states, without formation of any subsequent thermal hadronic medium.
