World's Top Arms Exporters Visualized

Importers: <a href="http://insightfulinteraction.com/armsimport.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;insightfulinteraction.com&#x2F;armsimport.html</a>

Hi my name is Natalia, and I&#x27;m the creator of this visualization. I want to thank the person who posted it here, and everyone for the discussion. I&#x27;d love to hear topics&#x2F;ideas you are interested in for the future visualizations.

Wow. I always knew the US exported arms, so I kind of expected that we were the worst offenders. But whoa! Look at Russia. The country must be depending on weapon exports to keep their economy going, which is simply not diversified enough to weather through the down times.

This was an interesting way to visualise the arms database.<p>Some patterns are interesting:<p>What appears to be almost 50% of Russia&#x27;s exports go to India, while what appears to be almost 90% of China&#x27;s exports go to the countries surrounding India (Pakistan, Bangladesh, and a Myanmar).

No surprise with Russia topping the list. Since 1990 the country&#x27;s entire economic output has been exploiting what&#x27;s left of soviet infrastructure and selling natural resources.

With as popular as Glock is, you&#x27;d think Austria would be bigger than a basically insignificant sliver.<p>I suppose if it was scaled by units sold instead of dollar values that may swing it towards inexpensive small arms like Glock pistols. Actually, that may be why USA and Russia are so enormous as exporters: they make expensive heavy arms like tanks, artillery, warplanes, ships, machine guns, bombs, while lots of places &quot;gun guys&quot; (which I sort of am) would think may show up (like Austria) won&#x27;t because they only make relatively cheap small arms.<p>All of my arms are made in Russia or USA, if that means anything.<p>EDIT: Some other commenters have mentioned the stats don&#x27;t include firearms and crew-served machine guns. Again, it&#x27;s all the big stuff.

Interesting that Ukraine has higher arms export numbers than Sweden, Netherlands and Spain. I never knew Ukraine was an arms exporter at all.

I think showing the types of arms exported by country would be considerably more meaningful. I&#x27;d be interested to know if the reason the dollar amounts for certain countries is so high is that they&#x27;re selling very expensive defense systems and not just a high volume of small arms. And from the source data, it looks like the value is expressed in constant 1990 dollars.

Visualizations like this are always awesome, but it would also be interesting to see the inverse of this chart.<p>Where do countries import arms from?

As cool as it looks, its almost impossible to get the finer details with these kinds of visualizations.<p>For example, India apparently exports 10m worth of arms. To find out which countries buy from India is nearly impossible because of the relative scale of the visualization.

What are major conventional weapons? Does that include rifles and pistols?<p>Phillipines apparently has less than $1M in exports, yet it&#x27;s home to Armscor &#x2F; Rock Island Armory, which sells quite a bit into the US.

Germany&#x27;s largest importer is Israel. What an interesting world.

<a href="http://insightfulinteraction.com/armsproducers.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;insightfulinteraction.com&#x2F;armsproducers.html</a><p>...quite different!

Surprised by the fact that India buys and keeps it. And looks like China buys and give to all the Indian border countries. *Indian here

I notice there is no US-russia trade. Is this due to trade sanctions?