'Remember Hiroshima Nagasaki' badge

This badge features the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament symbol with a paper origami crane. Cranes are significant in Japanese culture. Thousands of folded paper cranes are created every year for Hiroshima, and are invested with their makers' hopes and prayers for peace.

At the end of the Second World War, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, and Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. Both cities were devastated. At least 70,000 people were killed instantly in the Hiroshima blast and 40,000 instantly in Nagasaki, with tens of thousands more dying or suffering from radiation in years to come. These atomic bombs were the first to be used in war and they kick-started the nuclear-arms race.

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was launched in London in February 1958 (the New Zealand Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament began in 1959). British graphic artist Gerald Holtom designed the symbol that came to represent the movement.

The symbol can be read in different ways. It can symbolise a man with outstretched arms against the background of the globe. Holtom himself recalled: 'I was in despair. Deep 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 round it.'

It can also be a cross formed by combining the semaphore signals for the letters N and D ('nuclear' and 'disarmament').

The symbol became an emblem of the anti-Vietnam War movement in the 1960s and the counter culture. It gained currency internationally and has been used ever since to express the desire and determination for universal peace.

Wearing protest

The visual culture of anti-nuclear protest often took form in a range of popular media, including t-shirts and badges. Badges are accessible, mass-produced objects, cheap to make and purchase, easily disseminated, and effective in conveying political messages.