The Terror of War (Napalm Girl) is a 1972 photograph by Nick Ut showing 9-year-old Phan Thị Kim Phúc and other children running from a napalm attack in Trảng Bàng, South Vietnam, during the Vietnam War. The children had been caught in an airstrike as they fled the village; Kim Phúc suffered severe burns across her body. The photograph captures her screaming in pain, with soldiers and other villagers in the background. It was quickly published worldwide, influencing public opinion about the war. The image earned Ut the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography and the World Press Photo of the Year, and remains one of the most recognized photographs documenting the human cost of armed conflict.

In 2025, a debate arose over the authorship of the Napalm Girl photograph, long credited to Nick Ut. A documentary claimed that Vietnamese photographer Nguyen Thanh Nghe may have taken the image, later sold to the Associated Press. While AP maintains Ut’s credit, the dispute highlights uncertainties in journalistic attribution decades after the fact

“Napalm Girl is not art because it is beautiful or composed, but because it has become a work through which the world thinks, visually, ethically, historically, about violence.” (Babak Fakhamzadeh)