2 Minutes To Midnight version by Ghostman

A protest song about nuclear war, "2 Minutes to Midnight" was written by Adrian Smith and Bruce Dickinson. The song attacks the commercialisation of war and how it is used to fuel the global economy ("The golden goose is on the loose and never out of season"), how rich politicians profit directly from it ("as the reasons for the carnage cut their meat and lick the gravy") and how after a war concludes, the world is left in a far worse condition than before the war began, resulting in future wars and the development of more powerful weaponry ("to the tune of starving millions to make a better kind of gun").

The song title references the Doomsday Clock, the symbolic clock used by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which represents a countdown to potential global catastrophe. In September 1953 the clock reached two minutes to midnight, the closest it ever got to midnight in the 20th century,[2] when the United States and Soviet Union tested H-bombs within nine months of one another.[3] The atomic clock, set at 12 minutes to midnight in 1972, regressed thereafter among US–Soviet tensions, reaching three minutes to midnight in 1984 – the year this track was released – and at that time the most dangerous clock reading since 1953.[4] According to Dickinson, the song critically addresses "the romance of war" in general rather than the Cold War in particular.[5]

Interesting final fact - the song, which fundamentally criticises the atomic-weapon-age - was released 39 years to the day after the first use of the atomic bomb, on 6th August 1945, at Hiroshima.