Kadison and Kastler introduced a natural metric on the collection of all
C*-subalgebras of the bounded operators on a separable Hilbert space. They
conjectured that sufficiently close algebras are unitarily conjugate. We
establish this conjecture when one algebra is separable and nuclear. We also
consider one-sided versions of these notions, and we obtain embeddings from
certain near inclusions involving separable nuclear C*-algebras. At the end of
the paper we demonstrate how our methods lead to improved characterisations of
some of the types of algebras that are of current interest in the
classification programme.