Can a(n electro)magnetic field be amplified to overcome the residual strong force between protons-neutrons in a nucleus?
My knowledge of physics is cursory at best, I never studied it in high school but I enjoy reading about it as a layperson, especially the posts here on PSE. I don't understand any of the complex math of physics (anything that involves symbols instead of just raw numbers) but I don't mind looking up terms and reading up on them, so if you can/do answer my question please explain it the best way you know how to. My question may be immediately obvious or wrong for a simple reason, if so please tell me, and I apologise for any incorrect or non-specific terminology. I am wondering about the relationship between the idea of a coupling constant, and the orders of magnitude of electromagnetism, and I am wondering about this specifically in the context of comparing it to the strong force, as the title of the question may imply.
I imagine a single helium atom, two protons, two neutrons, two electrons, all together as a single atom, and I imagine it in as unobstructed an environment as is possible/necessary; no other atoms around, no stars emitting electromagnetic radiation, no large gravitational bodies, nothing interfering with it in a substantial way. Now what I want to do, is to find a way to use electromagnetism to separate the protons from the neutrons. 187
Is this possible?
And I ask it for this reason. I have read that, generally speaking, electromagnetism is 1/137th the 'strength' of the strong/color force, and that this represents its coupling constant which is dimensionless (and I am not entirely certain how being dimensionless affects all of this), but I have also read that you can increase the strength of a magnetic field, even to the point where you can 'influence' the paramagnetic or diamagnetic properties of certain atoms that would in all normal everyday Earth scenarios appear to be magnetically neutral - for instance, you can levitate a frog by interacting with the water atoms inside it with a strong enough electromagnet and so on.
Does this mean that you could, with a sufficiently powerful enough magnetic source, directed if need be/possible, and on a small enough scale that any dispersion of the magnetic field wouldn't weaken it significantly (do magnetic fields follow the inverse square law as electromagnetism does, or something along those lines?), latch onto say the quarks inside the protons and neutrons and pull them apart from each other. Or at least pull apart one nucleon from another so you would have two deuterium atoms left over?
I have read the post http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/44007/can-electromagnetic-fields-be-used-to-deconstruct-and-reconstruct-atoms, and several others, but I think that my question is different enough to warrant a separate post (or at least it didn't really answer it), and I couldn't find an answer to it elsewhere. I realise that this scenario is both unlikely and unwieldy, but I just wonder, as I said above, what the actual relationship is between the idea of a coupling constant, and whatever strength you can amplify a force to. Does that question make sense at all, or where have I gone wrong? 187