All the fanfare and furor over the actual arrival of the year George Orwell picked as the title for his frightening novel has obscured the fact that 1984 has another significance, this one being historical rather than literary: it is the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I. And what began with the guns of August 1914 has haunted modern memory far more and for longer than the vision of a state run by Big Brother. Yet the circumstances that led to the Great War, the causes that sent millions of young men to death in the trenches have tended to be ignored or overlooked by American statesmen obsessed with what might be called a "Munich mentality" in which the events of 1938 seem more germane to our times than those which led to the bloodletting of 1914—18.But, as Sterling J. Kernek emphasizes in his "Historical Reflections on the Dangers Ahead," the arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union is more analogous to the pre-1914 period than to the pre-1939.There are, however, several consoling factors that make the outbreak of another gigantic military conflagration like that of 1914 unlikely in this decade. For one thing, what was for so long the problem of Europe—and the major cause of two world wars—the German problem has been resolved (at least temporarily) by the division of Germany. For another, there is no longer any illusion about the glories of modern war such as that which afflicted the young men who rushed to the colors in 1914.Finally, there does seem to be a realization on both sides of the Iron Curtain that any major war between the superpowers will be the last major war, with the world ending not with a whimper but with a gigantic nuclear bang. These are among the reasons why Mr. Kernek concludes that in the short run we should be "grateful that we are living in a relatively halcyon and golden age."