This Ain’t a Scene… It’s an Arms Race

Gun control has become a hot topic recently in the United States. Due to the increase of deaths at the ends of firearms there have been a lot of studies showing how guns flow through America. I wondered what of the larger weaponry. Items like missiles, tanks, and jet fighters Who is buying these heavy duty weaponry? Or do governments just produce their own weapons?

My intuition led me to believe that most heavy weaponry would be produced by China and USA and would be headed toward warzones like Syria, parts of Africa, and parts of the Middle East. These conflict zones surely need the most weaponry. In order to explore this hypothesis I needed data. Luck for me, there is an entire database full of heavy weaponry purchasing and selling. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute monitors major weapons acquisitions [1]. Using this database I could trace who the major players are and where arms are moving.

After a little clean up I was able to make the plot at the top of the post. In that plot are the major trades ( that were recorded) starting in 1975, however the bulk of the trades were from the 2000’s onward. There are a few different symbols flying around there. The picture below has example of all the icons. All icons were found on the link below [2].

Starting from the top left we have:  Ships, Missiles, Radar Tech, Armored Vehicles, Air Defense, Hand Held Rockets, Aircraft, Military Tech, Engines, and Naval weaponry.  As you can see in the map above, lots of arms are bought and sold by the world.

Some of the more interesting points are where the arms are going and where they are coming from. USA is a big exporter and importer of arms. As expected a lot of arms flow into the Middle East. Hardly any heavy weaponry flows toward South America or, surprisingly, Africa (I guess I’ve seen Lord of War too many times).  A good amount of arms are also making their way toward South East Asia and not surprisingly, South Korea.

It would be interesting to further explore this data to see if the next conflict arises near where many of the arms are flowing toward. Or even if past arms data coincided with the Iraq/Afghanistan war.

The map above was created in D3, and, as we know, I am a very new javascript programmer so I relied heavily on the tutorial found here [3]. This post made it easier to get a map up and running and to make the animations and plotting smooth.

– Marcello

[1] http://www.sipri.org/databases/armstransfers/armstransfers

[2]http://www.freepik.com/free-icon/

[3]http://www.tnoda.com/blog/2014-04-02