Interaction of cosmic ray nuclei of different charge (z = 4-8; z = 10-14; z = 20-28) with the Ag, Br and C, N, O nuclei was analysed. The energy dependence was obtained for the following multihadron production characteristics; (a) half-angles θ1/2π of meson emission; (b) meson multiplicity per interacting nucleon; (c) shower particle quasi-rapidity distributions; (d) width of the quasi-rapidity distributions of mesons.The heavy-nucleus interactions were compared with nucleon-nucleon and nucleon-nucleus interactions, at intermediate and minimum impact parameters.A theoretical approach based on the assumption of a collective nuclear interaction mechanism and on the recently developed model of multihadron production in elementary interactions was used to interpret the experimental results.

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An interpretation is given for the nuclear scaling of cumulative hadron spectra that provides an understanding of its nature and universality. A simple explanation is presented for the well-known remarkable fact: the spectra of cumulative protons also obey the nuclear scaling though their sources strongly differ from sources of mesons and antiprotons in physical parameters. This explanation has been found by analysing the channel of cumulative production of hadrons in the framework of the gluon-dominance model elaborated for describing the multihadron production.