In this chapter, I will detail the chiral effective field theory ( \(\chi \) EFT) approach to derive nuclear interactions and electroweak currents. This approach—rooted in the symmetries of the QCD Lagrangian—has become popular in the nuclear theory community. There are a number of recent reviews of \(\chi \) EFT [1–3] and it is beyond the scope of this thesis to discuss the formalism in detail; therefore, I will review only the salient points of \(\chi \) EFT potentials and currents with a particular emphasis on the properties of the fully local Norfolk two- and three-body (NV2+3) potentials [4–7] and consistent electroweak transition operators [7–14] that I use throughout this thesis.