War is a big business -- one of the biggest businesses on the planet. While I doubt anyone would be shocked to find out that the United States is THE largest player in this whole economy, some of the other major players are... interesting. Italy, for example, exports three times as much armament as Canada. And the United States seems to be the only significant exporter of small arms for civilians. There's been howls about guns going to Mexico, but the truth is that the United States apparently exports to almost every country in the world -- and Thailand is currently one of the larger buyers.
This doesn't embed, so you'll have to click:
http://workshop.chromeexperiments.com/...
Wikipedia thoughtfully provided a list of wars from 2003-2010:
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
It's interesting to go through the timeline and look at the wars and how much money is poured into these conflicts.
ABOUT THE DATA:
This is a Google visualization project. Information on sources and so forth can be found here:
http://igarape.org.br/...