Holtom, a Royal College of Art graduate and wartime conscientious objector, designed the symbol in 1958: the semaphore signals for N and D, nuclear disarmament, in a circle. He told Peace News the deeper source: I was in 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 around it. It debuted at Easter 1958 on the Aldermaston march, on five hundred cardboard lollipops, black for Good Friday's death, green for Easter's life.
The first badges were fired white clay, distributed with a note: after a nuclear war, these pottery badges would be among the few human artefacts to survive the inferno. The symbol was never copyrighted, deliberately, a symbol of freedom, free for all, which is why it decorates both protest lines and mall t-shirts. Apartheid South Africa tried to ban it; American fundamentalists called it Satanic, the broken cross, a rumor Holtom's documented despair refutes with a straight face.
The claim: the peace sign is the sole mass symbol designed with its own post-apocalypse in mind, the clay badges are a message in a bottle to whoever digs, which makes the symbol not optimism but evidence: we were here, we objected, on the record. Verdict: the designer's own materials support the darker reading, despair formalized, survivable artifact. That the world wears it as casual hope is the kind of meaning-drift this archive exists to document. The firing-squad peasant is still inside the circle. Look again.
If the symbol means despair formalized, what does it mean that we wear it as hope?