Get While the Getting is Good

Imagine stepping into a gigantic elevator reaching to the stars. A voice comes over the PA speaker "Ground floor, the extinction of humanity. Going up." As you ascend the outlook becomes much less...cataclysmic. That's the great thing about looking up from rock bottom; you are as low as you can get, but you can see where you could be. The only thing left to do is start putting one had over the other and climb.

Do yourself a favor and read this timeline about the continued rise of humanity.

Nuclear Crisis story idea

There is easily a story here. A good officer over a lackadaisical crew who could end the world with their ineptitude. 

17 officers stripped of ICBM command/control

In the story I think it would be hard to paint the lead officer as good at his job if all this ho-hum garbage is happening under his command. The easy fix to that is say that he has recently transferred and this is his first assessment of the station. Maybe he has actually seen first hand what these nukes can do. He was in another sector on a ship in a holding pattern that was charged with a massive nuclear strike on a planet. They were always on alert, yet inactive, just waiting for the call they knew would eventually come. 

After the strike, he's planetside, or in atmo, cruising surveillance of the damage. He speaks out against the decision to hit what turned out to be a mostly civilian population. He realizes that the scorched-earth policy claimed millions of lives to take out 1 military facility that wasn't even weaponized - it was just a plant/factory where parts of powerful weapons were manufactured. The civilians didn't even know what they were making because they only saw the piece that was immediately in front of them. It was just a job for them. 

I would call the officer J.T. Ford. His CO that ordered the strike and later sends Ford off to this crap-tastic new position is G. (George) Harold "Harry" Sherman.