Arms trade

Mapping the World's Biggest Weapons Exporters – and their Best Customers

War kills. And war sells. These maps show the world's four biggest arms exporters and their major clients.

While they reveal a lot about who mongers weapons to whom, the sequencing on this graph is a bit misleading.

Reader's instinct nudges us to interpret the maps clockwise from top left, as a series in descending order. But the correct order is anti-clockwise, from bottom left: the top seller is the U.S., followed by Russia, France and China.

The maps are based on figures for 2011-2015, published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). They exclude weapons trade deals below $100 million. The total volume of arms sales for this period was higher than for any other five-year stretch since the end of the Cold war, in the early 1990s.