Thermolysis and shock loading can produce similar major stable products in energetic materials, despite different chemical evolution and reaction pathways. Here, we develop EMFF-MACE, a reactive machine-learning potential for C/H/N/O energetic materials, enabling thermolysis simulations of 20 materials and shock simulations of 10 on a common potential energy surface.

Comparisons at matched normalized reaction progress reveal divergent chemical states and local structural environments. Mean reaction-state similarity decreases from 94.0% at 20% progress to 25.9% at trajectory endpoints, while 47.1-92.6% of shock local environments lie outside corresponding material-specific thermolysis reference domains.

Structural and reaction-network analyses reveal enhanced intermolecular reorganization and additional association and rearrangement branches under shock loading, despite partially shared early decomposition chemistry. These findings show that loading history influences the structural states and subsequent reaction pathways accessed during decomposition, rather than merely the rate of thermolysis.