I originally believed the machines invented time travel. They knew they were going to lose, and somehow at the same time they discovered/invented time travel, and the last ditch play was to change the timeline. Then JC & company came into some room after the last of the machines was destroyed, and found the time machine. Someone realized what it was, and realized Skynet had sent a Terminator back in time. He sent Kyle back, and as aar as we know, destroyed the time machine.
But now I don’t really think Skynet had that ability for hard science, for out of the box thinking. I suspect some human, some guy in his bathroom, maybe, invented the time machine not long before judgement day. He never got to use it. Somehow Skynet got it. In the time it took them to understand what they had, the humans destroyed them. If they hadn’t have had skin-covered terminators already made, they’d have been sunk.
What third world countries are you thinking of with no guns or explosives? The Middle East, Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, and ‘around Russia’ Asia all have lots of guns and explosives, even if they don’t have a large manufacturing base or complex infrasturcture. Other than Antarctica which is barely inhabited, there isn’t a continent that you could just walk across without encountering lots of RPGs, rifles, MGs mounted on trucks, IEDs, and other fun things even if they don’t get any of the tech advances in the terminator universe. The US Army has encountered a lot more than sharpened sticks and harsh words since the invasion of Iraq, after all.
And what continent has no countries with infrastructure and manufacturing? South America and Australia don’t have any nuclear powers, but have manufacturing, and every other continent has at least one country with nuclear weapons (again, excepting Antarctica, which also has no people to bother with).
No, Skynet is going to have to do a LOT of fighting to take over the whole world.
Well, according to the Aliens vs. Predator vs. Terminator comic from a few years back, after the victory over Skynet…there was a military cover-up to conceal that the war had ever taken place. Or at least, that it had been fought against Machines. (I forget which. It was a very silly idea.)
By comparison, a fanfic a read a few years back had a scenario where, immediately postwar, a Resistance scientist had put forth a scheme where the best option for survival for the badly bottlenecked and radiation-effected gene pool of humanity was to interbreed with the population of reprogrammed/defector Terminators on Techcom’s side. Well, to split hairs, interbreed with the cloned and genetically enhanced flesh covering their robotic endoskeletal frames.
This is also a very strange and silly idea, but at least arguably a less stupid one.
Many places, such as African countries, buy all their weapons. IEDs usually require the E to work. You can make only so much bathtub C4 before the machines burn you out.
And no one is going to use nukes against terminators. Not out of any prohibition, but because it’s killing ants with a sledgehammer.
Didn’t Skynet start by launching all of the missiles (at least all of the American ones, while the Soviet missiles were launched in response)? So I don’t know if any nukes are left, and this initial maneuver killed the vast majority of the humans.
Well, it would be a good first step on the road to systemic reform, but I don’t think that the defeat of Skynet would fix China’s authoritarian governmental model in one step. Their Social Credit system is arguably worse in concept, though it’s related to Skynet.
There’s also the sizable store of nuclear gravity bombs and, depending on when Judgement Day takes place, nuclear artillery shells (and likely other warheads) in stockpiles—and that’s just in the US. At the time of the war, there would have been seven other nuclear-armed countries who might not have used their weapons at the command of (or in retaliation to) Skynet or Russia, and/or might not have had their weapons wiped out during the war.
Of course, this is also a scenario with a full-scale nuclear exchange that killed billions in a single day, and was specifically said to have caused a nuclear winter. Even a country that wasn’t nuked or in immediate range of Terminator liquidation campaigns (e.g., Botswana) is likely to be in a bad state. Famine, internal chaos, loss of vital trade (fuel, chemicals, medicine, agricultural supplies, etc), effects of fallout, etc…is likely to be in pretty poor shape.
Most places, such as the US, buy all their weapons. Yeah, there are gun factories, but those are easy, centralized targets that Skynet is going to go after first. Places in the Third World with gunsmiths working by hand in home workshops are going to fare a lot better than the US will.
EDIT: The Southern Hemisphere wouldn’t be affected much by a nuclear winter.
I don’t have a cite to back this up, but I would bet there are more home gunsmith workshops per capita in the US than in the average 3rd world country.
Almost certainly there are more home workshops that could quickly turn into home gunsmith workshops.