The Nucleon-Nucleon Interaction and Large N_c QCD

The nature of the nonrelativistic nucleon-nucleon potential in the large N_c limit is discussed. In particular, we address the consistency of the meson exchange picture of nucleon interactions. It is shown that the nonrelativistic nucleon-nucleon potential extracted from the Feynmann graphs up to and including two-meson exchange diagrams satisfies the spin-flavor counting rules of Kaplan and Savage, and Kaplan and Manohar, provided the nucleon momenta is of order N_{c}^{0}. The key to this is a cancelation of the retardation effect of the box graphs against the contributions of the crossed-box diagram. The consistency requires including $\Delta$ as an intermediate state.