Arms in the world

Today, through a link from the online edition of Corriere della Sera (the main italian newspaper) I had a look to an interesting web visualization (a Rich Internet Application made using Processing) that is able to visualize historical flows of arms around the globe.

Data are from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and they describe the flows of weapons as legal trades among countries and, for this reason, they don’t count the total and real amount of them used into a single country.

I also tried to play with the processing visualization, discovering that Italy (and, in general, the main countries) are doing good business selling arms to developing countries or african states.

It seems interesting to investigate this database further, in order to answer to questions like these:

– During the years, what have been the flows among Italy and Congo ?

– How many weapons Italy sold to US from 1978 to 1980 ?

– Who have been the best world wide seller country from 1990 to 1995 ?

– Who is the top seller of weapons to Ciad from 2001 to 2006 ?

– When US started to sell weapons to Iraq ?

– In the history, who is the top buyer country of Italian weapons ?