time bomb

plural time bombs · alternative timebomb · alternative time-bomb

1. A bomb that has a mechanism such that detonation can be preset to a particular time.

   At 9.40 a.m. on Bank Holiday Monday, August 5, a ganger found what was thought to be a time bomb at a level crossing at Tempsford, near Biggleswade, Bedfordshire, […] Inside one box was a brick; the other contained the works of an old alarm clock.

   1957 October 28, “Notes and News: Bomb Hoax at Tempsford”, in Railway Magazine, pages 735, 736

2. computingA malicious program designed to perform a destructive action at a certain date or time.

   Donald Gene Burleson was prosecuted on felony charges for planting a time bomb that, shortly after he was fired, deleted more than 168,000 brokerage records of USPA & IRA in Fort Worth, Texas.

   1994, Peter G. Neumann, Computer-Related Risks, Addison-Wesley Professional, →ISBN

3. figurativelyA situation that threatens to have disastrous consequences at some future time.

   Someone must explain to Sunak about the time bomb ticking beneath his £1,000 loafers.

   2023 May 31, Nigel Harris, “Comment: GBR now! We have no Plan B”, in RAIL, number 984, page 3

   2 more examples

   Even so, they managed to morph the recent European parliamentary elections into a time bomb and plant it under their country’s own future.

   2014 June 6, Françoise Fressoz, “France’s Ticking Time Bomb”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, archived from the original on 27 Feb 2021

   The pandemic preparation timebomb detonated to devastating effect; a number of other timebombs are on the shortest of fuses. The government has now reached a state of perfect vicious cycle, when the only thing worse than the things it does are all the things it didn’t get round to doing.

   2023 June 30, Marina Hyde, “The tide is coming in fast on Rishi Sunak – and it’s full of sewage”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 12 Aug 2023

   Synonyms: ticking bomb, ticking time bomb