As far as we know, the operation of the cheget today is more or less the same as it was under the Soviets. There are actually three briefcases—one each for the president, the Defense Minister, and the Chief of the General Staff (a position similar to the American Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff). The “triple key” system, which requires all three to input their respective launch codes, was designed to keep any one person from having ultimate authority given the intense competition between the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff in the Soviet Union.
In the present day, however, there is some ambiguity regarding the chain of command given that the prime minister—first in the line of presidential succession—does not have a cheget. Nuclear expert Alexei Arbatov has
warned about a potential crisis if the president unexpectedly became incapacitated and has pushed Russian lawmakers to fix this system.
The cheget allows its operator to communicate with other Russian officials using a secure system code-named “Kavkaz” (the Russian word for the Caucasus). The briefcase is a part of Kazbek (also named after a mountain in the Caucasus), the command and control system which operates the Russian nuclear arsenal. The only known activation of the cheget occurred in 1995 during the
Norwegian rocket incident.