Minutes to Midnight is the fourth track on the 1984 album Red Sails in the Sunset by Australian music group Midnight Oil. The song was written by band members Peter Garrett and Jim Moginie.
The title and lyrics of the song allude to the Doomsday Clock, the Cold War-era symbolic clockface maintained by the Board of Directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, serving as a barometer for the likelihood of nuclear war (or more generally "catastrophic destruction"). The threat of a nuclear confrontation was a pertinent subject at the time the song was written, and the "three minutes" to midnight to which the lyrics allude was the real-life setting in 1984, the closest to midnight the clock had been set since 1953, and a setting which has since never been surpassed.
The lyrics warn of escalation in the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union ("ICBMs, SS-20s / they lie so dormant, they got so many"), and allude to both H.G. Wells and heralded Australian racehorse Phar Lap.
Famous quotes containing the words minutes and/or midnight:
“O, beware, my lord, of jealousy!
It is the green-ey’d monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on. That cuckold lives in bliss
Who, certain of his fate, loves not his wronger;
But, O, what damned minutes tells he o’er
Who dotes, yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves!”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Sir Andrew Aguecheek. I know, to be up late is to be up late.
Sir Toby Belch. A false conclusion. I hate it as an unfilled can. To be up after midnight and to go to bed then, is early; so that to go to bed after midnight is to go to bed betimes.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)