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:
“I have proved by actual trial that a letter, that takes an hour to write, takes only about 3 minutes to read!”
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)
“Formerly, when lying awake at midnight in those woods, I had listened to hear some words or syllables of their language, but it chanced that I listened in vain until I heard the cry of the loon. I have heard it occasionally on the ponds of my native town, but there its wildness is not enhanced by the surrounding scenery.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)