By South China Morning Post | Created at 2025-01-21 09:21:23 | Updated at 2025-01-21 13:52:15
4 hours ago
A small town mayor in New Zealand has picked a nuclear fight with Donald Trump, after the freshly sworn-in US 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 seized on the subatomic slight, pointing out that New Zealand-born physicist Ernest Rutherford pioneered work to split the atom.
“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 honour belongs to Nelson’s most famous and favourite son Sir Ernest Rutherford,” mayor Nick Smith wrote on social media.
Credited with splitting the nucleus of an atom during experiments at UK’s Manchester University in 1917, Rutherford was “the first to artificially induce a nuclear reaction by bombarding nitrogen nuclei with alpha particles”, Smith said.
