Doc’s last words: “This…thing…doesn’t work!”
One thing to keep mind about the episode “Tapestry” is that’s not even clear if Picard actually traveled back in time or if it was just a hallucination/dream caused by Q. So the people in that “altered timeline” may never have really existed and only be figments of Picard’s(or Q’s) imagination. So I am not sure any “rules” of time travel should apply to the episode.
I’ve wondered that too. It’s just not clear.
The basic idea would also apply to First Contact. In that brief instant after the Borg sphere goes through the time portal and the Enterprise following, you can see the Earth has been Borg-ified. All those billions of people alive in 2063 were painfully Borged, and countless billions were never born, and billions more were born as Borg. Not to mention whatever other planets were assimilated by the new Earth Borg base.
And all those stories, all those lives, only briefly existed until the Enterprise corrected the timeline, before they were never-existed out of reality. But to the people themselves - it was years of painful reality.
To be fair, plutonium wasn’t available to civilians either.
I’m sure in 2021 plutonium is in every corner drug store, but in 1985, its a little hard to come by!
So he stole the vest from the Libyans?