"potential menace" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to refer to something or someone that could become a problem or a threat in the future. For example, "Climate change is a potential menace that could have devastating consequences on our planet."
The blight and the potential menace created by the distribution boxes are hardly new issues.
Replacing one potential menace with another — like an environmentally dirtier and costly natural-gas plant — would be a bad outcome.
Kuwaiti officials are bitter about Iraq's 1990 invasion of their country and see the Hussein government as a potential menace.
Gergen regards Newt as a potential menace not just to Romney and Rove, but to President Obama, too.
BlaBlaCar also came up with a quirky way to deal with another potential menace — garrulous drivers and passengers.
It is a common system, if rather dated, that poses marginal threats to modern military aircraft with modern countermeasures, but is a potential menace to civilian aircraft.
Zooming cars, trucks and, yes, bicycles loom as potential menaces if you're old and on foot.
And countries like Spain, Italy, Portugal and Ireland, long "exporters" of people, have begun to receive third world immigrants only in the past decade and still view them as potential menaces to national identities.
The practice was officially outlawed in 1999, when honeybees were included on a health code list of more than 100 wild animals that New Yorkers could not keep, including vultures, iguanas, ferrets and even whales: they were all potential menaces.
The exposure of a large and complex system to attacks carried out by exploiting well-selected sequences of vulnerabilities can be hard to evaluate, but this is a fundamental step to prevent potential menaces in both the system design and operation phases.
In light of the N.S.A. and earlier "Cable Gate" scandals, the Brazilian government may believe the Pentagon sees the country as a menace or potential threat.
