There’s also the parallels in biosecurity, though in these cases the West was not escalating, and others misread the strategic threat. Other than the soviet program, which you mentioned, the obvious case is the Japanese program was supposedly started because westerners were writing about the dangers of pathogens in warfare, and how it should be banned, and the Japanese assumed they had programs pre-WWII, so developed at tested bioweapons at a mass scale in China.
There’s also the parallels in biosecurity, though in these cases the West was not escalating, and others misread the strategic threat. Other than the soviet program, which you mentioned, the obvious case is the Japanese program was supposedly started because westerners were writing about the dangers of pathogens in warfare, and how it should be banned, and the Japanese assumed they had programs pre-WWII, so developed at tested bioweapons at a mass scale in China.