Peace symbol

The peace symbol (☮) was designed and completed February 21 1958 by Gerald Holtom, a commercial artist in Britain. The symbol resembles a crow's foot in a circle.

Holtom had been commissioned by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament to design a symbol for use at an Easter march to Canterbury Cathedral in protest against the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston in England.

The symbol itself is a combination of the semaphore signals for the letters "N" and "D", standing for Nuclear Disarmament. (The letter "N" is two flags held in an upside-down "V", and the letter "D" is one flag pointed straight up and the other pointed straight down).

Conspiracy theorists have ascribed a number of occult meanings to the symbol, rejecting the explanation that it stems from the semaphore. The far-right John Birch Society, for instance, has referred to it as a "broken cross" – accusing the peace movement of repudiating Christ. It has also been called a relative of the Nazi swastika – or the rune algiz inverted, said to mean "hidden danger". It resembles the rune calc.

In Unicode, the peace symbol is U+262E, and can thus be generated in HTML by typing ☮ . However, many browsers will not have a font that can display it.