Kiwi mayor slams new U.S. leader for crediting atom splitting to Americans

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AFP) — A small town mayor in New Zealand has picked a nuclear fight with Donald Trump, after the freshly sworn-in United States president heaped praise on American scientists for splitting the atom.

Trump’s inauguration address rattled off a list of crowning American feats such as ending slavery, launching into space, and the moment they “split the atom.”

The mayor of Nelson in New Zealand’s South Island seized on the sub-atomic slight, pointing out that work to split the atom was actually pioneered by Kiwi-born physicist Ernest Rutherford.

“I was a bit surprised by new President Donald Trump in his inauguration speech about US greatness claiming today Americans ‘split the atom’ when that honor belongs to Nelson’s most famous and favorite son Sir Ernest Rutherford,” Mayor Nick Smith wrote on social media said.

Credited with splitting the nucleus of an atom during experiments at the United Kingdom’s Manchester University in 1917, Rutherford was “the first to artificially induce a nuclear reaction by bombarding nitrogen nuclei with alpha particles,” Smith said.

Widely regarded as the “father of nuclear physics,” Rutherford was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1908 for earlier work on radioactivity.