What are different interpretations of the Peace Symbol?
The first appearance of that circle with lines in it that came to symbolize peace in public was in a march as the symbol for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. They hired a man named Gerald Holton to design it for them, and he sold it on the basis of the symbol being a combination of semaphore signals for their initials. Semaphore, in case you didn’t know, is a way to send messages by holding flags at different angles. Because many of the people attending such a rally were otherwise interested in the cause of peace, they ended up adopting that symbol and associating it with peace in general, and not the organization that was promoting a particular march. Ironic, in a way, since many symbols are intended to do the opposite – publicize the user of it. Holton later came up with other reasons why it looked the way it did. And who knows? Maybe he originally designed it with something else in mind and just SOLD it to the CND with that song and dance about semaphore. If his later stories a
