[someperson]

Compaq did a clean room reverse engineering effort of the IBM BIOS for interoperability. Under US law this is completely legitimate.

China can and should do clean room reverse engineering for whatever technology they want to, and sell the resultant work back to the US (contingent on other IP restrictions of course)

And the US and Netherlands are well within their rights to block equipment equipment to China on grounds that it will be used by a unfriendly military.

The atomic bomb example is not just about "the principle has been proven", it was also a story of Soviet Union spies within the Manhattan Project.