  We investigate effects of strong interactions on the electromagnetic
dissociation of nuclei in heavy ion collisions. We start from the eikonal
approach to the equivalent photon method to describe the electromagnetic
contributions to the cross section of peripheral collisions. We summarize some
results of this approach and characterize recent experiments in "universal
plots". In the second part of this work, we give a straight forward method to
include transitions induced by the strong interactions between the ions. We
introduce different methods to obtain the nuclear transition potential, and
study the behavior of the resulting nuclear contributions.
