Give Peace a Chance

The Nihon Hidankyo group has been awarded the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize. This is both uplifting and thought-provoking to me.

Who is the Nihon Hidankyo group?

According to the Nobel Prize website, Nihon Hidankyo, or the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Victims' Organizations, was established in August 1956. Nihon Hidankyo has campaigned tirelessly for improved healthcare for hibakusha (bomb-affected people) and a complete ban on nuclear weapons. Thus the award of the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize.  

Why was this thought-provoking to me? 

Because when I researched the origins of the Peace Symbol, I found that it originated at the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) conference, held in the UK in 1958. This was two years after Nihon Hidankyo was founded.  

Gerald Holtom famously designed the original logo for the CND in 1958 to represent Total Nuclear Disarmament that would later become known as our peace symbol. 

How did that happen?

In designing the symbol, Gerald Holtom cleverly combined the semaphore (naval) flag signals for the letters "N" and "D" (representing Nuclear Disarmament) and superimposed them. He then enclosed the design in a circle to signify "total," resulting in a logo meant to represent "Total Nuclear Disarmament."  View the flags below, or by clicking here.

During the 1958 conference, buttons featuring this symbol were distributed to attendees, including Philip Altbach, a student from the University of Chicago and the National Chairperson of the Student Peace Union (SPU). He introduced the design to his school’s organization, and it quickly gained popularity, spreading across SPU chapters in colleges and universities nationwide and was to go on to be identified as the peace symbol.  

When I found Philip Altbach in 2012, he was Professor Emeritus at Boston College, and it was a thrill as well as thoroughly interesting to interview him on his experience as a student who adapted that conference’s symbol to be what we now know as the peace symbol. You can read the interview here. 

It’s intriguing to wonder if Nihon Hidankyo, founded two years earlier, might have had representatives at the same pivotal conference in the UK where the symbol debuted. 

While it’s unclear whether the two groups ever crossed paths, they shared a common goal: the elimination of nuclear arms. Who knows—perhaps Philip Altbach himself encountered members of Nihon Hidankyo at that conference as he gathered a few of those peace symbol buttons, which he later introduced to the United States. Today, that symbol has become a universal emblem of peace recognized around the world.

Click here to browse our peace symbol jewelry collection and wear a timeless reminder of the universal desire for a world in peace.