SYM·0011 · CND badge
Peace
nuclear disarmament, then everything
- Unicode
- U+262E peace symbol
- Meaning
- Two semaphore flag positions overlaid inside a circle: N and D, for nuclear disarmament. A initialism drawn rather than spelled.
- History
- Made by Gerald Holtom in February 1958 for the first Aldermaston march, and adopted by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Holtom also described the figure as a person with arms outstretched downward in despair — the semaphore and the human posture were intended together, not one after the other.
- Variants
- Stroke weight varies freely; the enclosing circle is sometimes dropped, which removes the semaphore reading entirely.
- Related
- ☭ ☯ marks that outgrew their first cause.
- Appears
- Anti-war movement, counterculture, and now any surface at all — the mark has almost no remaining connection to nuclear weapons.
- Evolution
- Single-issue campaign badge → general anti-war sign → decorative motif.
Sources · 3
- documented Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, on the badge’s design and its deliberate non-copyright: Holtom did not register it, and CND has never claimed it, which is a large part of why it spread.
- documented Gerald Holtom’s own explanation, preserved and published by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament: the semaphore derivation and the despairing figure, given together.
- folk That it is a “broken cross”, “Nero’s cross” or a witch’s foot — a reading circulated by the campaign’s opponents in the 1960s and still repeated. It postdates the design, and the designer’s own explanation is on record, which is precisely what makes this the site’s clearest specimen of a folk reading.