if you force to elements together(ex. titanium) will they have a chemical chain reaction and split atoms?

Question

This is what i mean, august 1945 the first atomic bomb was created. It simply shot one peice of uranium into another. This would cause them to fuse and because radioactive elements tend to give off more neutrons they react better for an atom to split and cause energy to be released causing an explosion. My question is if you can get any two elements to crash into each other with that much force will it cause their atoms to split and have a chain reaction resulting in an explosion. ( maybe like two bullets shot at each other perfectly or something with that much force or more)

Answer 1

You are asking about two completely different processes. Nuclear fission is the chain reaction of splitting atoms. Only heavy, unstable nucleii can sustain a chain reaction.

Chemistry is the field which studies chemical reactions. These interactions between atoms involve only the outer shell of valence electrons; the nucleus never changes.

Answer 2

This would not work for the simple reason that fissionable elements have to have unstable atoms to begin with. A chain reaction requires that the neutron production reach a level that is too high for the element's atoms to remain intact. This requires what is called a "critical mass", which is not only a specific mass of the substance, but a purity which puts the unstable atoms as close to each other as possible. The chain reaction isn't a result of the collision of the two parts that collide, but the sudden buildup of neutron emission that was there to begin with. In stable elements, there is no neutron emission, so there will be no chain reaction.

Answer 3

When they shot 1 piece of uranium into another, it caused the uranium to reach critical mass. This is why it exploded.
If you have a sphere, the larger it gets, the smaller the ratio of volume to surface area gets. A 'chunck' of uranium gives off radiation. There has to be enough surface area for the radiation to emit from. Once you have more radiation trying to emit from the element than the surface area can allow to pass, you have reached critical mass. This is around 7 pounds for uranium. The second explosion used a different method. They amassed enough uranium so that it was just under critical mass. Then they covered the entire sphere with explosives. When the explosives were discharged, the blast 'compressed' the uranium just enough to where it went critical.
The reason there is a chain reaction is because if the particle of radiation cannot escape into the atmosphere, it hits another atom. This causes the atom to split - these two particles hit 2 more particles, these 4 particles hit 4 more particles, these 16 particles ... etc. If you shot 2 bullets of anything into each other, it would not cause a chain reaction because they don't have enough mass. If you shot 2 - 4 pound balls of uranium into each other they would explode, as you already know. In fact in order to have enough energy for a hydrogen bomb to go critical, they need to use an atom bomb in order to slam the 2 parts of fussionable material into each other.
Only radioactive material will go critical. Other materials are stable. If you could extract 100% of the energy out of 1 penny, you would have enough energy to blow up New York, Chicago, and Las Angeles. The fact is, in a nuclear explosion, we can only extract about 2% of the energy. Otherwise, 7 pounds of uranium would be enough energy to crack the earth in half.