Hard nuclear processes and microscopic nuclear structure

Methods to test QCD-inspired theoretical ideas on microscopic nuclear structure, in high-energy hard lepton-nucleus reactions, are reviewed. Special attention is given to options at existing facilities and at facilities that will come into operation in the early nineties (the jet target facility at PEP and CEBAF). The importance of light-cone dynamics, the physics of large longitudinal distances, and the presence of point-like quark-gluon configurations in hadrons for the theoretical description of high-energy processes (and especially nuclear shadowing) is explained. Ways to investigate the interrelations between perturbative and nonperturbative QCD in nuclear shadowing are suggested. Options for probing the hard scattering wave functions of hadrons are analysed.