The eastern seaboard, communications hubs and centers of industry will go first.
It's easy to mop up the military bases once the command structure and supply lines have been annihilated (and defectors/equipment may come in handy post-war). If the aggressor survives the initial strike, they basically just needs to wait.
(That'd only happen if the mutually assured destruction mechanisms failed. They're set up to glassify the surface of the earth once the government collapses. Most military bases get melted during that wave, but then so does everything else.)
The craziest part is that the Russians actually built the doomsday machine from Dr Strangelove, and then kept its existence secret.
Game theoretically, that somehow made it a better deterrent, as sarcastically posited in the film.
At least they didn't do something really dumb, like set the launch codes to all zeros()
() yes, that was the actual launch code. They probably didn't sticky note it to the monitor though, at least at first.