Minutes to Midnight (song)

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages) The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guideline for music. Please help to demonstrate the notability of the topic by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond a mere trivial mention. If notability cannot be shown, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. Find sources: "Minutes to Midnight" song – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (June 2020) (Learn how and when to remove this message) This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Minutes to Midnight" song – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (June 2020) (Learn how and when to remove this message) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

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.^[1] This setting was surpassed only recently, after the inauguration of American president Donald Trump in January 2017, when the clock was set at two-and-a-half minutes to midnight.^[2]

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.