Seconds

The relationship between rock and the Cold War doesn't get any more intense than in this song. Somewhere between two eras where rock songs were mainly about love and erotic passion, it was possible to record a hit song about the end of the world. "Seconds" emphasizes the brevity, the triviality with which nuclear weapons could end human civilization, a contrast that is black comedy in "Doctor Strangelove" but here, it's just bleak.

The hard drumbeat that is heard first has a military cadence, which is echoed later by the U.S. Army call-and-response drill song, "I wanna be an Airborne Ranger." That song was a year later also sung by John Bender as he ran through the halls in "The Breakfast Club." The drumbeat and the song within a song both seem toxically naive as the Western world eagerly militarized under Ronald Reagan on a path that risked the future of the human species.

One line beginning with a string of initials calls out nations and cities key to the Cold War: the USSR, East Germany ("DDR" in German), and major cities in the UK, US, and China – four of these being nations with major nuclear arsenals and the fifth being the Warsaw Pact country astride the European border where the land battles of World War Three could begin.

1983 was the year that "The Day After" terrified many Americans with a vision of nuclear devastation in America's heartland while virtually simultaneously a NATO military drill called Able Archer terrified Soviet leaders who thought that the drill might be used to mask a real surprise first strike of U.S. nuclear bombs upon the Soviet Union. A few months before those, "Seconds" called out the same threat; one must appreciate the intensity of 1983's war hysteria and U2 for calling it out urgently before those events later in the year and, for example, the film "Red Dawn" the next year. The Fixx's nuclear war anthem "Red Skies" was released in 1983 in the US, but had just been released in the UK before U2 began recording "War" and can be seen as a likely, if partial, inspiration for "Seconds."

The urgency of this song's message is multiplied by the elements that surround it – the album name and the band's name also call out the Cold War, the song before it is about violence and bloodshed, and coming just a moment after the end of "Seconds," the feverish keyboards that begin the next song on the album, "New Year's Day" seem unmistakably like a continuation of "Seconds" and have to make the listener think that the button pushes and computerized sequences that launch missiles have begun. Songs later on "War" that are implicitly set in peacetime are nonetheless full of tension about international disorder and passions gone wrong. Then, in a peaceful release "40" ends the album with a religious meditation asking the listener who has had their fill of Cold War tensions to "sing a new song." The album is a taut and terrifying critique of war and "Seconds" is where that message is laid out early and fiercest. It's hard to listen to it decades later and not remember the corner that civilization had painted itself into and how important it is not to return to the nuclear game of Mutual Assured Destruction.