The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute offers very detailed data about the international arms trade on their website. Using some shell scripts, sed and XSLT I converted some of it to the Google Earth KML-Format, resulting in this:
I thought, exploding
the countries off the surface, relatively to the amount of weapons they trade was a nice metaphor. But using a linear scale, the USA and Russia would be at moon-distance (which Google Earth does not display correctly, oddly) while most of the others would stick to the ground. Thus the logarithmic scale, still impressive. The spikes over the capitals are in linear scale, though.
Still 24MiB. Coming soon.
Far more interesting, though is this other dataset, also from said site: it contains individual transactions, often with commentary, always with source and target country, the time and estimated worth
. Here the arcs represent individual transactions between two countries, their height shows the size. Thanks to Earth’s cool timeline feature, you can select a timespan between 1950 (where the data starts) and 2006, as, unfortunately, the view will become enormously cluttered…
Should I succeed to shrink the file and color the arcs according to countries, it too will be released.
