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:
“English people apparently queue up as a sort of hobby. A family man might pass a mild autumn evening by taking the wife and kids to stand in the cinema queue for a while and then leading them over for a few minutes in the sweetshop queue and then, as a special treat for the kids, saying “Perhaps we’ve time to have a look at the Number Thirty-One bus queue before we turn in.””
—Calvin Trillin (b. 1940)
“Late hours, nocturnal cigars, and midnight drinkings, pleasurable though they may be, consume too quickly the free-flowing lamps of youth, and are fatal at once to the husbanded candle-ends of age.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)