This does not seem good.<p>The world has never really reconciled the biological and chemical atrocities that went on in Asia during WWII and since, like they have in Europe. The Japanese used chemical gas attacks (munitions of unexploded gas are still found in China today) and did live vivesections on prisoners, amputating their appendages until there was nothing left. Hitler’s SS thought the atrocities so bad in China they asked for permission to intervene at several points. I doubt China has forgotten any of this, as they are expanding funding by several orders of magnitude into research on Japanese WWII atrocities.<p>To the north, Russia supposedly developed a type of chemical weapon even more powerful than nerve gas at one point in the 70’s. After the Cold War, while everyone was worried about nuclear weapons, Soviet bio and chemical scientists were easily available for hire and research. The Japanese cult that dumped Sarin into the Tokyo subway in 1996 had gotten far towards procuring many nerve agents as well as biological agents this way (developing powder to spread live agents that survived for weeks proved too difficult though).<p>Everyone talks about nuclear weapons, but biological, and to a lesser degree chemical, weapons have been under the radar for so long, governed by treaties that intellectually are still in 1918, that this needs to be looked at very seriously.