Yeah, I can totally see this -- Stane not so much instigating Howard, as encouraging Howard's worse traits.
Also, like some of the other comments were discussing ... I hadn't thought about it quite this way 'til commenters pointed it out, but the sheer practical considerations of developing tech for SHIELD probably played a role too. SHIELD has some high-tech, nasty toys. Whether Howard developed weapons for SHIELD and then sold them as a sideline, or worked out some deal with the government where he could basically equip his own private army as long as he gave them the same stuff, or what, it still seems not only likely but downright inevitable that if Howard was actively involved with SHIELD's R&D division, at least some of what he worked on was probably their offensive capabilities, and he probably did other things with the tech than simply give it to SHIELD.
... Though also, like I was saying in a comment on the LJ side, I don't quite agree with the MCU movies' postulation that weapons manufacturing is de facto evil, and anyone who does it is tainted by association. That's how it works in the MCU movies, but I don't agree that's how it works IRL, so I don't really think that it follows that Howard working on weapons development at ANY point means he'd lost track of his moral compass in all ways. Heck, Tony is still making weapons, in the form of the suits, throughout the movies. Anyway, though, I can totally see Stane as Howard's bad-idea friend who pushes him to act in ways that are personally destructive for him, and pushes the company towards profit-above-ethics even more so than Howard would've done on his own.
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Also, like some of the other comments were discussing ... I hadn't thought about it quite this way 'til commenters pointed it out, but the sheer practical considerations of developing tech for SHIELD probably played a role too. SHIELD has some high-tech, nasty toys. Whether Howard developed weapons for SHIELD and then sold them as a sideline, or worked out some deal with the government where he could basically equip his own private army as long as he gave them the same stuff, or what, it still seems not only likely but downright inevitable that if Howard was actively involved with SHIELD's R&D division, at least some of what he worked on was probably their offensive capabilities, and he probably did other things with the tech than simply give it to SHIELD.
... Though also, like I was saying in a comment on the LJ side, I don't quite agree with the MCU movies' postulation that weapons manufacturing is de facto evil, and anyone who does it is tainted by association. That's how it works in the MCU movies, but I don't agree that's how it works IRL, so I don't really think that it follows that Howard working on weapons development at ANY point means he'd lost track of his moral compass in all ways. Heck, Tony is still making weapons, in the form of the suits, throughout the movies. Anyway, though, I can totally see Stane as Howard's bad-idea friend who pushes him to act in ways that are personally destructive for him, and pushes the company towards profit-above-ethics even more so than Howard would've done on his own.