Fifty years ago on a cold, grim Easter holiday, a protest was meant to be a watershed: a global call to ban the bomb.
People marched from London to a factory in the countryside where Britain built its atomic bombs. Pat Arrowsmith was among those early campaigners for nuclear disarmament.
"It was quite clear that we were not just against the tests, and we were not just against the British bomb," Arrowsmith said. "We were against the Soviet bomb and against the U.S. bomb."
The nuclear weapons industry at Aldermaston is still very much alive. But so is the spirit of that protest fifty years ago. It lives on in a symbol born here that became an icon.
Gerald Holtom was the artist and textile designer who created it.
A conscientious objector during World War II, he was driven to the nuclear disarmament campaign, he said, by a feeling of despair.
Many of us baby-boomers think it was born out of the Viet Nam war protests. Live and learn.
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