In my mind it makes things safer because there's less pressure to launch a counterattack before any missiles actually hit - revenge will be had.
But this fact that the silos will be targeted and destroyed is actually a feature because it means it's North Dakota that gets to become a wasteland and that's not really a bit of the US you care about, or so the reasoning goes. The nuclear sponge they call it (the ICBMs silos needing to be targeted by enemy nukes, not North Dakota proper).
If your silos can largely survive an enemy missile, and retain the ability to launch, you can wait for more information to come in.
If you silos are expected to be wiped out, say, because the US re-fused their warheads [0] to increase the probability of a silo kill, then it's use-it-or-lose-it with a 15 minute decision time.
[0] https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-moderni...
The USSR's later leadership didn't want to give the Premier the authority to start WWIII. That authority belonged to the Politburo, and, having gotten rid of Stalin, those who had power after him didn't want that much power in one person again.
Hence the Dead Hand system. The Premier could activate that in an emergency. All it really did was, if Moscow was destroyed, and the Premier's bunker wasn't communicating, and the General Staff bunker wasn't communicating, was start a timer of several hours. If nobody in authority checked in during that time, it released the launch codes to regional commanders, who could then decide on their own what to do. So a lot of people could stop a retaliatory strike, and no one person could start it.
The USAF's SAC had the actual info needed to launch missiles in the hands of SAC commanders, a much weaker system. While General Power was head of SAC, the arming codes for the missiles themselves were set to all zeros. This was not known by the civilians supposedly overseeing the US military.