Peace symbol (☮)
A circle with a vertical line and two lines slanting down from its centre, designed by the British artist Gerald Holtom in 1958 for a march against nuclear weapons. The lines are the flag-semaphore signals for N and D, for nuclear disarmament. In Britain it is still the logo of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; elsewhere it is known as the peace symbol.
Meaning
Holtom gave the symbol two readings. The first is a code: the semaphore letters N and D, for Nuclear Disarmament. The second is a figure. In a 1973 letter to Hugh Brock, who had edited Peace News in 1958, he wrote: “I was in despair. Deep despair. I drew myself: the representative of an individual in despair, with hands palm outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya's peasant before the firing squad. I formalised the drawing into a line and put a circle round it.” In Britain the symbol still means nuclear disarmament and is the logo of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND); in the rest of the world, CND says, it is known more broadly as the peace symbol. It has never been copyrighted. CND says no one has to pay or ask permission to use it, and notes that it is often used for commercial, advertising and fashion purposes.
Origin and history
The symbol was made for a march. The Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War, a small group of activists brought together by Harold Steele's 1957 protest against British H-bomb tests at Christmas Island and influenced by Gandhi's methods of nonviolent resistance, planned a walk over Easter 1958 from London to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston, in Berkshire. Gerald Holtom, an artist in Twickenham, was in charge of its visuals. He was a professional designer, a graduate of the Royal College of Art, and a conscientious objector who had worked on a farm in Norfolk during the Second World War. He showed his sketches to a small group in the Peace News office in north London and to the Direct Action Committee, which decided to use the symbol. His first idea, CND says, had been a Christian cross in a circle, but the priests he approached did not want the cross carried on a protest march.
The symbol first appeared in public on that march, over the Easter weekend of 1958. Five hundred cardboard lollipops on sticks were made, half black on white and half white on green. Like the church's colours over Easter, they were to change “from Winter to Spring, from Death to Life”: black and white on Good Friday and Saturday, green and white on Easter Sunday and Monday. The Imperial War Museums hold the placard that the protester Ernest Rodker carried on the 1958 march and on many protests after it. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, launched the same year, took the symbol up later in 1958. The first badges were made by Eric Austen of Kensington CND, in white clay with the symbol painted black, and handed out with a note that in a nuclear war these fired pottery badges would be among the few human artefacts to survive.
Holtom's original drawings, four sketches on three sheets of paper, belong to the Commonweal Library and are kept by the University of Bradford's Special Collections; Hugh Brock's widow Eileen gave them to Commonweal. Badges kept the symbol in view. The British Museum holds about three hundred British peace badges, Philip Attwood wrote in 2011: the earliest from the years just after 1958, most from the 1980s, when CND revived over the decision to base US nuclear weapons in Britain. The Science Museum Group keeps CND badges from about 1982 among its badges on nuclear themes.
What does an upside-down peace sign mean?
For Holtom it meant unilateral disarmament and the tree of life. The University of Bradford's Special Collections explain that Holtom felt his design did not show the need for individuals to act. A few days after submitting it, he saw that turned upside down it could be read more hopefully, as the tree of life, a Christian symbol of hope and resurrection, and that it was also the semaphore signal for U, for Unilateral. Ken Kolsbun, who corresponded with Holtom in 1975 for his history of the symbol, told CNN in 2018 that Holtom came to prefer the inverted version and wanted it on his tombstone. Other groups changed the symbol in their own ways: Christian CND extended the central stroke upward to form a cross, and CND Cymru and Scottish CND added a daffodil and a thistle.
How it reached the United States
In the United States the symbol was first taken up by the civil rights movement, CNN reported in 2018. It was probably brought over by Bayard Rustin, a close collaborator of Martin Luther King Jr., who had been on the 1958 march. On the way across the Atlantic it lost its tie to nuclear disarmament and came to mean peace in general. “In the 1960s in the US, it was mainly anti-war,” Kolsbun said. “I didn't even know it meant nuclear disarmament.” As the Vietnam War escalated it became the badge of the anti-war protests and the counterculture, and, free of copyright, it travelled to Czechoslovakia as a sign against the Soviet invasion and to South Africa against apartheid. CND notes that the apartheid government made an official attempt to ban it.
Claims that it is satanic
Claims have circulated that the symbol has older, occult or anti-Christian associations. CND says groups in the United States spread the idea that it is satanic, or condemned it as a Communist sign. In 1969, Kolsbun told CNN, the John Birch Society denounced it in its monthly magazine as a sign of the devil, the story spread across America and The New York Times picked it up, and some people still see it as a satanic sign. CND's answer is that Holtom described the symbol's origins and the ideas behind it clearly, in letters and in interviews.
See also
Dove, Sigils, Schrödinger’s cat, Infinity symbol (∞), Autism infinity symbol, Neurodiversity symbol.
Sources
- History of the Symbol, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND)
- Nuclear Disarmament Symbol Drawings, Special Collections, University of Bradford
- 7 Posters And Placards From A Century Of Anti-War Protest, Imperial War Museums
- A brief history of the peace symbol, Jacopo Prisco, 23 July 2018, CNN
- Radical Objects: CND Badge, Philip Attwood, 7 April 2011, History Workshop
- Collection of badges on nuclear themes:- 3 Anti Nuclear Campaign, object 1990-513, Science Museum Group, object record
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Last reviewed October 1, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research