The Bomb Never Exploded by ConfusedYetHappy?

I'm not even 100% sure I believe this theory myself but it is one of the few ways I've been able to make sense of the recently aired finale.

As it is known, season 5 concludes with Juliet banging a rock on a hydrogen bomb and the screen goes white. I've had an issue trying, even before tonight, in trying to understand whether or not the bomb actually went off. After seeing the finale, I now propose that the bomb NEVER exploded.

The first piece of evidence is that Juliet is still very much 'alive' when we see everyone in the season 6 premiere. I put alive in quotes only because she is on the brink of death from her fall, but she obviously didn't suffer any effects of an exploding hydrogen bomb at point blank range (the only effect would being turned to dust since it was a HYDROGEN BOMB WITHIN ARM REACH). So if Juliet arrived in the present time with no additional damage from an explosion, I think that points in favor of the bomb not exploding.

Secondly, the fact that, as we learned tonight, there was never a true 'alternative storyline' that existed or needed to be created by a bomb exploding.

Thirdly, it is a hydrogen bomb. Even if it needed to explode for the smallest fraction of time to cause the Losties to be sent back to the present time (how that would happen? no idea.), there would be some effect on people standing that close to it (similar to point one).

Why is this important? With the revelation that what we've been calling the 'alternate universe' is actually some sort of purgatory/afterlife/LOST Soul Matrix, I can't find an explanation for what happened at the end of Season 5 that connects it to the events of Season 6. To make sense of it, I've theorized that the bomb NEVER exploded and that something else, maybe Jacob saying "They're coming...", is what sent our Losties from the 1970s to the the present. Or maybe it was the rules that we've heard so much about: The losties were so close to breaking the rule of not changing the past, but no matter how close they were, they were truly never capable of changing the past, and the universe corrected itself to stop them from changing the past by sending them back to the present. That sentence hurt my head. So maybe this isn't a theory but more of a rationalization of what happened for me to accept the finale because if the bomb did explode, I don't see how the Island was unaffected since we now know there is only one timeline.

Comment/help.