Minutes to Midnight (song) (original) (raw)

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, a symbolic timepiece published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which represents the proximity of nuclear war (or more generally "catastrophic destruction"), designated as "midnight". Nuclear confrontation was pertinent at the time of this song, the clock having regressed to a mere "three minutes to midnight" in 1984 from some 12 minutes in the preceding decade. This was the closest to midnight the clock had reached since the overt testing of H-Bombs by the US and Soviet Union in 1953. This setting was surpassed only recently, after