It just hit me
How the ever-loving forget did all the end-game soldiers survive the global world nuke
I mean jesus there's so many of them
It wasn't a nuke
It just ripped the ground apart, which wasn't really a problem if you've got mechanisms to hold things together (see: Cores)
The only reason the people of Caelondia got petrified was because of their proximity to the device, which wasn't supposed to go off in their faces anyway