Trump says the US has “split the atom”. New Zealand says this is not true.

After the recently sworn-in US president praised American scientists for splitting the atom, the mayor of a small town in New Zealand opted for nuclear war with Donald Trump.

Mr. Trump’s inauguration speech It lists America’s crowning achievements, such as ending slavery, entering space, and the moment they “split the atom.”

The mayor of Nelson, New Zealand’s South Island, is obsessed with subatomics, the work of splitting atoms actually pioneered by Kiwi-born physicist Ernest Rutherford.

“I’m a little surprised that the new President Donald Trump gave his inauguration speech today when Americans called it ‘split the atom,'” said Mayor Nick Smith. He wrote on social media.

In the year Rutherford, who was credited with splitting the nucleus of an atom in 1917 experiments at Manchester University in the UK, “was the first to artificially induce a nuclear reaction by masking nitrogen nuclei with alpha particles,” Smith said.

He said he would invite the US ambassador to visit the Rutherford memorial in Nelson, a town of 50,000.

Ben Uffindale, editor of the satirical New Zealand news website The Civilian, also disputed Mr Trump’s claim.

“Well, I have to call time. Trump said America split the atom. That’s one thing we did,” Uffindell said. He wrote on social media.

Widely known as the “Father of Nuclear Physics”, Rutherford was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908 for his earlier work on radioactivity.

While Rutherford was recognized for the first splitting of the atom, the Englishman John Cockcroft and the Irishman Ernest Walton were later responsible for the first control of splitting the atomic nucleus. US Department of Energy.

Rutherford remains one of New Zealand’s most famous children and his face still graces the country’s $100 bill.