Essentials of relativistic mean field (RMF) theory and some of its recent applications are presented. The explicit calculations are carried out for a few selected isotopic, isotonic, and isobaric chains of nuclei covering the entire periodic table. The calculated ground-state properties are found to be in good agreement with the corresponding experiment: the binding energies are reproduced, on the average, within 0.25%, and the charge radii differ only in the second decimal place of fermi. The relativistic origin of the pseudospin symmetry is briefly discussed. The density distributions obtained are found to be in good agreement with the experiment (where available). The peripheral factor - the ratio of the neutron and the proton densities at the nuclear periphery, extracted in the antiproton annihilation experiments - is well reproduced. The RMF densities are used to calculate the reaction (_R) and charge-changing (_cc) cross sections in the Glauber model as well as the (cluster)-daughter interaction energy. The energy in turn is employed to estimate the decay half-lives of superheavy (transactinide) nuclei in the WKB approximation. The calculations are found to agree well with the experiment. This success of the RMF in accurately describing the nuclear properties with only a few fixed parameters is indeed remarkable.

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