We predict the Z 0 transverse momentum distribution from proton-proton and nuclear collisions at the LHC. After demonstrating that higher-twist nuclear effects are very small, we propose Z 0 production as a precision test for leading-twist pQCD in the TeV energy region. We also point out that shadowing may result in unexpected phenomenology at the LHC.The physics plans for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, which is going to be the highest-energy accelerator on Earth, include a heavy-ion program. Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) for both hadronic and nuclear collision will enter a new era at the LHC, where we hope to discover new physics. However, "standard physics" needs to be tested in the new, high-energy regime.At LHC energies, perturbative QCD (pQCD) provides a powerful calculational tool [1]. Clearly, an understanding of pQCD at the hadronic collision level is a prerequisite for the discussion of particle production in nuclear collisions. Enhanced power corrections from multiple scattering in both the initial and final states, not to mention potential new physics from the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), make pQCD predictions for nuclear collisions more difficult than for hadronic collisions.The testing of pQCD in nuclear collisions at the LHC requires "clean processes", where pQCD works well on the hadron level. One of the important recent advances in pQCD theory is a reorganization of perturbative corrections (folding selected logarithmic contributions at all orders into exact low-order calculations), which is beginning to provide practical applications [2]. The softgluon resummation for the inclusive production of colorless massive states [3][4][5] may be the best understood and best tested among these resummation techniques. For the transverse momentum distribution of heavy bosons of mass M , when p T ≪ M , the p T distribution calculated order-by-order in α s in conventional fixed-order perturbation theory receives a large logarithm, ln(M 2 /p 2 T ), at every power of α s , even in the leading order in α s . Therefore, at sufficiently small p T , the convergence of the conventional perturbative expansion in powers of α s is impaired, and the logarithms must be resummed.The heavy-ion program at the LHC will make it possible to observe the full p T spectra of heavy vector bosons in nuclear collisions and will provide a testing ground for resummation theory in nuclear collisions. In the present paper, we focus on Z 0 production [6,7]. Based on LHC design luminosities [8], we estimate that a month of running will provide ∼ 4 * 10 5 Z 0 events in a proton-proton (pp) collision, and ∼ 8 * 10 2 Z 0 events in a Pb+Pb collision in a p T interval of 0.5 GeV in the peak regions of the corresponding spectra. Due to the large mass of the Z 0 , and no final state rescattering in its production, nuclear effects from final state interactions are expected to be small. We will show that the power corrections enhanced by initial state rescattering also remain small. Thus, leading twist pQCD should work well here. The only im...