In terms of perturbative QCD we estimate the shape of the high-momentum tail of the nucleus wave function. We derive QCD predictions for the yield of leading particles in nucleus fragmentation processes. The predicted yield is much larger than the expectations of the quark counting rules. Obtained formulae are in reasonable agreement with the momentum and angular dependence of cumulative particle production. We derive general expressions for deep inelastic lepton-nucleus scattering using the LSZ representation for the amplitude and use it to calculate the scaling violation in high Q 2 near threshold eD scattering at x ⩾ 1. It is shown that the existence of few-nucleon correlations explains the large cross section of the deep inelastic process e+ 3He→e+… and leads to a larger effect for heavier nuclei. We demonstrate that the observed features of ν( ν) + A → μ ± + backward proton + X data indicate the dominance of few-nucleon correlations in the nucleus wave function over average field configurations at momenta > 0.4 GeV/ c. Implications of these data for the magnitude of smearing in deep inelastic processes are also considered.