T-shirt, 'Nuclear-Free Peacemaker'

This t-shirt is concerned with New Zealand's nuclear-free stance in the 1980s. The logo was conceived by Lawrence (Larry) Ross, founder of the Nuclear Free Zone Committee in Christchurch. He laid the 'CND' symbol over a map of New Zealand and the Southern Cross, making it one of the most famous and well-known of New Zealand's anti-nuclear designs.

T-shirts are ideal vehicles for protest.  They are cheap and easy to produce, and provide a free and relatively safe billboard to a cause as wearers go about their daily business wearing their sympathies on their bodies.

Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

CND stands for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament which 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” (http://www.cnduk.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=435&Itemid=131).

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.