If it was ever used, that work saves lives.
The history of nuclear brinksmanship is built on almost the exact opposite problem: people who are completely willing to sacrifice themselves for the cause and their government and who believe fully that the cost would be worth it and the decision would be correct.
At the expense of one's own life is one of the easiest sacrifices to make, and people who believe it are dangerous because they tend to volunteer a bunch of others to do so alongside them.
Nuclear command and control isn't about keeping any one person alive, it's very much about keeping the system functional so the deterrent is preserved. There's no way, within it, to actually ensure any level of personal survival - but the various advocates for first strikes at different points in history have never been concerned with that. They want their legacy, they want the problem solved "forever".
How would you do that? In the event of a nuclear war, my understanding is they'll mostly be flying around on special command and control planes. I don't think nuclear intercontinental SAMs are a thing. I'm not even sure if they could even be possible (wouldn't they need active guidance, which would be very hard on reentry).
The tier of generals just not senior enough to have a seat on the doomsday planes isn't in the emergency line of command to the nuclear weapons. So, regardless of how powerful a small coalition of those generals is, they cannot reliably prevent a nuclear launch. (They'd need a pre-existing conspiracy to quickly and efficiently turn their own air defence batteries against their own doomsday planes... at which point it seems very likely they'd just launch a coup long before a nuclear strike was ordered.)
So, I guess our last hope is that a small conspiracy of generals just under the doomsday plane tier would stage a coup once the nuclear sabre rattling reached a sufficient magnitude, before the nuclear first strike order is given.
