Collateral damage
From Command and Conquer Wiki
Collateral damage is the term for damage dealt to multiple enemies at once. Explosives, such as grenades or bombs (like the Firehawk) or artillery fire (the Juggernaut) can be sources of collateral damage. Flame weaponry, Gas weapons and Tiberium weapons, especially during the earlier wars, was very unsafe, as a single burst could hit multiple targets, including allies, and the death of the Flamethrower infantry would oftentimes ignite the thrower. Sonic weapons can hit multiple enemies at once and current-generation Obelisks can use sweeping lasers for infantry. Weapons of mass destruction such as nuclear weapons have a tremendous blast radius, and cause massive damage to anything caught by the blast.
On a darker note, "collateral damage" is used to refer to the deaths of Civilians, through direct military action, such as accidental (or intential) bombardment, or through the lack of adequate food or medical care due to wartime shortages. The Soviet Union largely did not care about the civilian death toll in both Soviet and Allied territories, as evidenced in their zeal to use Sarin. The Allied Forces tried to avoid causing unnecessary civilian deaths; though reports of Allied commanders destroying towns full of Soviet sympathizers do exist.
Nod attempted to utilize collateral damage to it's advantage; by framing GDI for a massacre at Białystok, to cause a political uproar. GDI tended to follow the Allied example and prevented civilian deaths, for instance, when the Forgotten rioted after Tratos's death, GDI used nonlethal means to quell the riots. However, the heavily armed Cultists were deemed to be too dangerous to subdue peaceably, and were defeated by Ghostalker. GDI hasn't always managed to avoid civilian casualties, however. During the Third Tiberium War, millions of GDI forces and civilians across Eastern Europe died in GDI's unintentional detonation of Kane's Liquid Tiberium Bomb. The alien Scrin have no regard for civilian safety, and destroyed many regions, such as New Eden that had significant nonmilitary populations.
