What if Michael is actually from WW3 Earth? The RA sensed she was in nuke danger and rescued her, knowing she had a part to play in what’s to come.
I agree with @DaveyNY that the WW3 thing may have been only a test of the suit and had no real significance. To go with your idea, maybe grandpa Burnham was in that group? Did they mention a last name for Jacob?
shortly after the angel stopped by a sleeping drunken Zephram, put headphones on his ears and played Beastie Boys' "GRATITUDE" really way too loud hurting his ears, and then announced she was Dark Vader from the planet Vulcan and gave him the basic formula for warp drive.
What if Jacob is her real grandfather, and that girl who's life Pike saved is actually Burnham's mother? Someone in a Red Angel suit goes back to the present of New Eden, grabs Jacob and his daughter, and puts them like 30 years in the past of the Trekverse. It could also help explain how Mama Burnham got the idea to build the suit - she was visited by someone wearing the suit.
I think it started with some Able Iron fellow suggesting the captain of the Saratoga was Burnham because black.
I like this. Cochrane wasn't the inventor of warp drive he was just given the specs and formula to make it work. He was too drunk most of the time so this makes weird sense to me.
That would certainly count as one of those technological leaps that S31 would've wanted to investigate with the suit. But it'd be awkward to have S31, the Borg, Picard and Vulcans all in one place. Or it'd be marvelous. I just wish there was one junction where all the time-traveling crews from all ST series would meet. I think the tribbles would bring them all together. It would either be touching OR something like Anchorman when all the various news crews met to brawl.
And now I want to see such a thing happen, maybe its a bar like the one at the end of Quantum Leap where Sam teleported in and spoke to "god" the bartender. All the ST timecops go there, some captains, Janeway even has a stool there with her name on it. It's a fun place. Well half the tech would not exist had it not been for that guy crashing in the 60s and forming Cronoworx? He ushered in the birth of tech in Star Trek. But tell me what you think of my bar idea.
Why? We still don't know a lot of things about the Red Angel. Why there are these red signals, for example. Or why exactly (and how) she transplanted a church full of people away from Earth's past to another planet. Why they thought the suit was future technology when it was from 20 years in the past. etc. etc.