Actually, you're completely wrong and terribly misinformed.
What later became an internationally recognized symbol for peace was originally designed for the British nuclear disarmament movement. It was designed and completed on 21 February 1958 by Gerald Holtom, a professional designer and artist in Britain for the 4 April march planned by the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War (DAC) from Trafalgar Square, Londonto the Atomic Weapons Research Institute at Aldermaston Christan. The symbol was later adopted by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). It was adopted by first the 1960s Anto War Movement, then the counterculture, and finally the popular culture of the time.
The peace sign flag first became known in the United States in 1958 whenAlbert Bigelow, a pacifist protester, sailed his small boat outfitted with the CND banner into the vicinity of a nuclear test.
The peace sign button was imported into the United States in 1960 by Philip Altbach, a freshman at the University of Chicago who traveled to England to meet with British peace groups as a delegate from the Student Peace Union (SPU). Altbach purchased a bag of the "chickentrack" buttons while he was in England, and brought them back to Chicago, where he convinced SPU to reprint the button and adopt it as its symbol. Over the next four years, SPU reproduced and sold thousands of the buttons on college campuses. By the late 1960s, the peace sign had become an international symbol adopted by anti-war protestors.
The symbol itself is a combination of the Semaphore signals for the letters "N" and "D," standing for N uclear D isarmament. In semaphore the letter "N" is formed by a person holding two flags in an upside-down "V," and the letter "D" is formed by holding one flag pointed straight up and the other pointed straight down. Superimposing these two signs forms the shape of the peace symbol. In the first official CND version (which was preceded by a ceramic pin version that had straight lines, but was short lived) the spokes curved out to be wider at the edge of the circle, which was white on black.
Holtom later wrote to Hugh Brock, editor of Peace News explaining the genesis of his idea in greater depth: "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." Ken Kolsbum, a correspondent of Holtom's, says that the designer came to regret the symbolism of despair, as he felt that peace was something to be celebrated and wanted the symbol to be inverted.
During the Viet Nam War, the John Birch Society and other right-wing groups propagated their belief that the CND symbol was a sign of the Antichrist. "One Bircher wrote that the broken cross had originally been devised by the Roman emperor Nero who had Saint Peter crucified upon it upside down."
