ABSTRACT
The United Kingdom (UK) is the world’s third-largest military spender (after the USA and the People’s Republic of China), has what is probably the second-largest arms industry, 1 and is – depending on one’s choice of measure – somewhere between the second- and fifth-largest arms exporter. Certainly, after the USA, the UK arms industry is one of the largest and most technologically advanced in the world, forming part of the ‘second tier’ of arms producers (Krause 1995), along with France, Russia, Italy, Germany and Japan.
