"A Clear and Present Danger"

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That's why, among those paid to think about the ultimate horror, the phrase of the moment is not "weapons of mass destruction" but "weapons of mass effect." The planes that flew into the World Trade Center were just such weapons. They were "conventional," in a sense, but designed to cause great loss of life and spread chaos and despair. The hijackers didn't need sophisticated technology. Nor may their successors. The East Coast power grid, for example, has less than half a dozen key switching points. Six truck bombs, packed with nothing more sophisticated than the fertilizer that blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City six years ago, could disrupt the economy of half the nation.

That's precisely what the bad guys had in mind the last time the U.S. faced a serious threat to homeland security. In 1942 two German submarines landed teams of four people each at Amagansett, N.Y., and Ponte Vedra, Fla. The Germans were supposed to blow up hydroelectric plants, key railroad junctions and spread terror in New York by bombing railroad stations and Jewish-owned department stores. The operation was a fiasco; within two weeks, all eight men were caught (six were later executed), but the threat was, and is, real.

All of which helps explain the attention now being paid to hazardous-material licenses. From July 1999 to January 2000, authorities say, an examiner in the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation issued commercial driver's licenses to 20 men without requiring them to take mandatory tests. All but two of the licenses covered haz-mat transport. By the end of last week, all 20 men were in custody. The FBI said that they did not appear to have a connection to the Sept. 11 attacks. But that was scant comfort; they might have had their own scary plans. At the least, the scam exposed gaping holes in the haz-mat licensing process--there are 2.5 million of the licenses nationwide, and in some states they're a notorious source of kickbacks.

It was another reminder that guarding against weapons of mass destruction may miss the real threat. When 100 Florida law-enforcement officials, utility executives and emergency-response officials met in Tallahassee last week, it wasn't a nuclear or biological threat that was most on their mind. It was a conventional attack on the Port of Miami, on the Sunshine Skyway that spans Tampa Bay, or on that most American of symbols, Walt Disney World.

Tom Ridge has the square-jawed profile and can-do resume--blue-collar background, Harvard, staff sergeant in Vietnam--to reassure even the most jittery parent contemplating a family vacation in Orlando. Ridge will need all that and more. He has not yet assumed his new post, which does not require a Senate vote. Officials have "red tagged" his security clearance, hoping he can get the O.K. in two weeks, not the eight months that some Administration officials have been waiting. In a series of White House meetings this week, Ridge started to divide his responsibilities into three baskets. The first will concentrate on emergency response, building on the work of the existing Federal Emergency Management Agency. A second will look at "hardening" targets now so soft that they may tempt terrorists. In the third basket, working with Bush's National Security Council (of which Ridge will be a member), the new office will seek to coordinate intelligence and law-enforcement activities against terrorism.

Senior Administration officials have promised that Ridge will be given budget "pass-back" authority, which means that he will be able to direct the agencies under his purview, like the border patrol, to reorder their spending priorities. His staff is expected to be about 100 strong, many detailed from other agencies. Ridge has already picked Mark Holman, his oldest and most trusted political associate, to run the operation as chief of staff, and is eyeing Admiral Steve Abbott, who has been the military voice on the homeland-security staff currently housed in the Vice President's office. White House officials say Ridge will have as much access to the President as Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Adviser. In the currency of Washington, that's saying a lot, for nobody has more. Ridge, White House officials say, will probably soon have an office in the West Wing.

It had better be a big one, with copious bookshelves and an acre of bare wall. The shelves can hold the reports, of which there have been depressingly many, on the nation's lack of preparedness for homeland security. (The three most recent ones total more than 500 dire pages. And the new General Accounting Office report says that federal bioterrorism defense is so chaotic the agencies can't even agree on which threats to worry about.) The wall space is needed for Ridge's organizational chart, for he will have to coordinate the activities of more than 40 federal agencies--and an unknown but much larger number in state and local governments. On Capitol Hill, if Ridge is ever foolish enough to stray into the building where he served 12 years as a member of the House, 26 full committees of Congress and 17 subcommittees deal with homeland-security matters.