Richard Rhodes in his two-volume work on A-Bomb and H-Bomb development talks a lot about MAD and how it led to rational but awful thinking. In the absence of better choices, the planners did what they thought was best, but both sides came to realise the only suitable posture was to be capable of retaliation and make sure the other side knew it, but also to minimise belief there was specific hostile intent.

Politicians didn't like it. the US never renounced first strike.

I still struggle with how "hard" a hardened C&C jet can be, and I think there is a general principle, that the EMP pulse you can defend against is not as big as the one the enemy can produce.

I read that defector provided soviet jets at one point had tiny weeny valves, which were not indications of how backward their electrical engineering was: they were capable of being rad-hardened more than the IC's of the time. I'm not sure this is true.