Happy Birthday!

February 21, 2008 marked the 50th birthday of the peace symbol.

The symbol was designed in 1958 by British conscientious objector and textile designer/artist Gerald Holtom for the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War (DAC) for their Easter march from Trafalgar Square, London, to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston, England. See photo below. It also became a badge for members of the British group Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament (CND).

















That same year, pacifist and former US Navy Commander, Albert Bigelow, sailed a 30-foot ketch, the Golden Rule, bearing a CND flag (which included the peace symbol), heading for the Eniwetok Proving Ground, the Atomic Energy Commission's atmospheric test site in the Marshall Islands. Much publicized, this was the first attempt to disrupt a nuclear test in protest against nuclear weapons.





















In 1960, Philip Altbach, a freshman at the University of Chicago, traveled to England to meet with British peace groups as a delegate from the Student Peace Union (SPU). He returned with a bag of buttons bearing the peace symbol and convinced SPU to adopt it as its symbol. The SPU reproduced and sold thousands of the buttons on college campuses. Eventually, the symbol came to symbolize the anti-war movement in the United States.