Why New Zealand mayor went nuclear after Trump claimed US 'split the atom'

During his inauguration address, Donald Trump rattled off a list of crowning American feats such as ending slavery, launching into space, and the moment they 'split the atom'.

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 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 honour belongs to Nelson's most famous and favourite son Sir Ernest Rutherford," mayor Nick Smith wrote on social media.

Rutherford, a Nobel Prize winner, is also known as the father of nuclear physics. He is regarded by many as the first to knowingly split the atom by artificially inducing a nuclear reaction in 1917 during experiments at UK's Manchester University.

English scientist John Douglas Cockroft and Ireland’s Ernest Walton are also credited for the development, but not Americans.

“Rutherford’s ground breaking research on radio communication, radioactivity, the structure of the atom and ultra sound technology were done at Cambridge and Manchester Universities in the UK and McGill University in Montreal Canada,” Smith wrote on Facebook.

He added that he would invite the incoming US ambassador to visit the Rutherford memorial in Nelson, population 50,000, "so we can keep the historic record on who split the atom first accurate".

Rutherford was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1908 for earlier work on radioactivity. He remains one of New Zealand's most famous sons, and his face still adorns the country's $100 bill.