# Is nuclear force a kind of strong interaction?

I'm trying to understand the role of Yukawa potential, and it seems to describe the nuclear force. But at the top of the article it says:

• The Yukawa potential is a simple potential that is not necessarily just applicable for the nuclear force, or even the Standard Model. Basically, it describes any force mediated by a massive boson (including as a special case $m = 0$, as for photons, giving the Coulomb potential). But you can use it for a simple model of the nuclear force where the massive bosons are pions. In this case, the underlying fundamental physics is just the strong force (electromagnetism is not important). – Elias Riedel Gårding Nov 10 '19 at 17:19
• No. Just think of Newton's law of gravitation and Coulomb's force law. These look the same (both are $1/r$ potentials). But they are both approximations of very different underlying theories (GR and QED). While the similarity is interesting, it doesn't necessarily imply a connection between them. Similarly, the nuclear Yukawa potential is an approximation that you get by replacing very complicated QCD processes (that were not known in Yukawa's time) by a simplified "effective theory". It is not a fundamental law. The fundamental law (as far as we know today) is the Standard Model Lagrangian. – Elias Riedel Gårding Nov 11 '19 at 8:59