The advent of heavy ion acceleration with the AGS at Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1986 and the proposed Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) for 1990 brings us into a temperature and density regime well above anything yet produced and into a time domain of the early universe of 10−13−1°sup -6/ seconds. The physics of high energy heavy ions range from the more traditional nuclear physics to the formation of new forms of matter. Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) is the latest, and as of yet, the most successful theory to describe the interaction of quarks and gluons. The nature of the confinement of the quarks and gluons under extremes of temperature and density is one of the compelling reasons for this new physics program at BNL. There are reasons to believe that with collisions of heavy nuclei at energies in the 10 to 100 GeV/amu range a very large volume of approx. 10 fm3 would be heated to 200-300 MeV and/or acquire a sufficient quark density (5-10 times normal baryon density) so that the entire contents of the volume would be deconfined and the quarks and gluons would form a plasma. The kinematic region for the extant machines and the proposed RHIC are shown. At AGS energies the baryons in colliding nuclei bring each other to rest, yielding fragmentation regions of high baryon density. These are the regions in which supernorvae and neutrons stars exist. For energies much higher, such as in RHIC, nuclei are transparent to each other and one can form a central region of almost zero baryon density, mostly pions, and very high temperature. This is the region of the early universe and the quark-gluon plasma. Design parameters and cost of the RHIC are discussed.