Weapons of the Week #8: The Biggest Gun Show in the World

Pictures from an atrocity exhibition.

[This edition of Weapons of the Week is coming to you late, which I regret. Rest assured I will see to it that, in the end, you get the number of dispatches promised by a weekly newsletter.]

A beer between bombs. (RFI/Jan van der Made).

From June 17-21, 60,000 people from 150 countries, including 96 countries which sent official delegation, gathered in a convention center near the airport in Paris. The occasion was Eurosatory 2024, the latest and biggest edition of the largest military-industrial trade show in Europe. The biennial convention began in 1967, with an exclusive focus on French hardware, and came into its own as an international event in the 1990s, when the Cold War ended and the world remained violent. In the last few years, France has overtaken Russia as the world’s second largest arms exporter (the US continues to export more weapons than the next five countries combined).

This year, there over 2,000 exhibitors from 62 countries, 41 of which had national pavilions. Below, you can see two visual representations of the international spread.