In his inaugural address on Tuesday, U.S. President Donald Trump made a series of false and misleading statements, including a claim about Americans "splitting the atom," which sparked strong dissatisfaction among New Zealanders on social media. They pointed out that this achievement should be credited to a pioneering scientist highly respected in New Zealand.
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03-26, 2025Ernest Rutherford, a Nobel laureate, is hailed as the father of nuclear physics. Many believe that he first consciously split the atom through artificially induced nuclear reactions in 1917 while working at the University of Manchester in England. Furthermore, British scientists John Douglas Cockcroft and Irish scientist Ernest Walton are also credited for their achievements in 1932 at the British laboratory established by Rutherford.
In his inaugural address, Trump included among the great achievements of the United States "crossing the deserts, scaling mountains, defying danger, winning the West, ending slavery, delivering millions from tyranny, helping millions escape poverty, harnessing electricity, splitting the atom, sending man into the sky, grasping the universe of human knowledge."
New Zealand politician Nick Smith, the mayor of Nelson, the city where Rutherford was born and educated, said he was "a little surprised" by Trump's statement. Smith wrote on Facebook: "Rutherford's pioneering research on radio communication, radioactivity, atomic structure and ultrasound technology was carried out at Cambridge University and Manchester University in England, and McGill University in Montreal, Canada."
Smith stated that he would invite the next U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand to visit Rutherford's birthplace memorial "so that we can accurately record the historical fact of who first split the atom." The U.S. Department of Energy's Office of History and Heritage Resources website also credits Cockcroft and Walton with this milestone, while also describing Rutherford's earlier achievements in mapping atomic structure, hypothesizing the central atomic nucleus, and identifying the proton. Trump's remarks have sparked widespread online discussion of Rutherford in New Zealand, where his work is studied by New Zealand schoolchildren, his name appears on buildings, streets and institutions, and his portrait is featured on the 100 New Zealand dollar bill.
