Today is the 50th Anniversary of the Peace Symbol.

If you’re like me, you have no idea how the symbol originated. You might be surprised to learn that it actually was designed with some meaning attached not just a faddish hippy thing.

It was designed by Gerald Holtem.

Originally, the symbol was for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (ND). It gets it’s design from the semaphore code letters for ND.

…the original sketches are preserved at the school of Peace Studies, at the Bradford University. They show a symbol that stood for ‘the death of man and the unborn child’ …it is said, that the reason for the symbol being upside down (D over N) is that semaphore is a military code and upside down symbolizes ‘anti-military’.the ends of the ‘arms’ and ‘legs’ thicken and splay out noticeably as they approach the circumference. the circle itself was thick - the thickening itself has two versions:
in one, all the straight strokes are thickened; in the other, only those in the lower half of the circle.

Eric Austin used white clay and painted it with the black symbol and distributed the symbols with a note explaining that in a nuclear war, the fired pottery badges would be one of the few things remaining made by humans.

The CND is still active today.

Peace.

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