(T/E) THE DEUTERON FORM FACTOR AND THE SHORT DISTANCE BEHAVIOR OF THE NUCLEAR FORCE*

The large q2 fall-off of the elastic deuteron form factor is used to extract se,veral new connections between nuclear and particle physics within the frame-. work of a scale invariant quark model. These include the relation of meson exchange to underlying quark currents, the relation of the deuteron form factor to large angle n-p scattering, evidence for scale-invariant behavior of the nucleon-nucleon potential, and a determination of the deuteron wave function at small n-p separation. The reduced nuclear form factor fA(q2), defined to remove the effect of the nucleon form factors, is predicted to obey the dimensional countring rule 2 (q) A-1 f,(q2,- const