The Peace Symbol

In November of 1957, a small committee was formed. February 17, 1958, they held the first public meeting of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. That same year, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament asked the artist Gerald Holtom to create a symbol for the movement. The CND has been at the forefront of the peace movement in the UK and claims to be Europe’s biggest single-issue peace campaign. Holtom’s design though has become one of the most widely recognized symbols on the planet. I am talking of course of the peace sign. 

More than one peace sign exists. There is a hand gesture comprised of a thumb holding down the ring finger and pinky as the index and middle fingers are splayed to form a “v” In some bit of irony, that hand gesture started on the battlefields of World War II. Allied soldiers held up the gesture signaling “v for victory” and sometime later, anti-war protesters adopted the gesture as a peace sign. 

The universal symbol developed by Gerald Holtom though, is the other peace sign, the one consisting of a circle with a vertical line down the center and two diagonal lines forming an inverted v shape going from the center of the vertical line down to the bottom portion of the circle. Gerald Holtom made line drawings representing the flag semaphores of N and D for nuclear disarmament then put it into a circle to represent the globe and because let’s face it, the roundness looks nice.

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