Who Spends the Most on Defence and Who’s Selling the Weapons?

With Keir Starmer recently losing a Defence Secretary and then leaving a budgetary timebomb for his successor as PM, Andy Burnham, I thought it might be interesting to see how we rank on defence spending and who are the world’s largest exporters and importers of arms. I started out by trying to find some data on arm sales and Claude sent me to SIPRI where you can download very granular data on almost every transaction but after playing with the data I decided to take a simpler approach and map expenditure as a % of GDP (which is what Trump and the NATO powers have been arguing about) and exports and imports of major arms. This was a pretty quick map to build (less than 3 hours from start to finish including sourcing the data). Claude pointed me to the summary data on the SIPRI and World Bank sites and then processed it into a json file. The map build was very simple as Claude used my standard spec for web maps, asked a few questions about colours and interface and then produced a…