Marching towards a theory of nonleptonic decays of heavy-flavour hadrons

Theoretical descriptions for the nonleptonic decays of heavy flavour hadrons have emerged that incorporate non-perturbative corrections in a systematic way and are genuinely based on QCD. One can reproduce $\tau (D^+)/\tau (D^0)$, $BR_{SL}(D^+)$ and $BR_{SL}(D^0)$ as due mainly to destructive interference in $D^+$ decays; one predicts $\tau (B^-)$ to exceed $\tau (B_d)$ by a few per cent; $BR_{SL}(B)$ is reduced only slightly, raising the prospects of a serious and tantalizing conflict with ARGUS \& CLEO data. It is emphasized that the lifetimes for the two mass eigenstates in the $B_s$-$\bar B_s$ system could differ by 30\% or even more. The status of phenomenological treatments of non-leptonic two-body modes is briefly reviewed.