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Our system is much tighter. That said, in our system, GROUPS of young men may have the ability to fire a weapon or start a reactor without authorization, but given the training and indoctrination, plus the culture of life in this country, the chance of getting a group to do something that heinous (referring to firing a weapon or unauthorized startup, not to acting as did Petrov) is infinitely small. I have far more worries about the Dr. Strangelove/FailSafe type of scenarios where the small group of people at the TOP of one side or the other convince themselves that an attack is imminent (as almost happened in Able Archer 83) or should be launched.
If you read Fiasco by Thomas Ricks or War In a Time of Peace by David Halberstam you are struck by how important the interface between civilian and military leadership can become. Of course, Halberstam covered similar ground in The Best and The Brightest. The most dangerous guys are the ones like the senior Soviet generals who wouldn't reward Petrov, or during the loss of the Kursk, the Admirals and Generals who kept insisting that the U.S. had sunk her (which, of course, would have been an act of war). But those guys had been selected primarily for conformity, not ability, character, and honor.
It does come down to somebody's call at the end. We all better hope that military promotion systems can remain depoliticized as much as possible, so that when the generals and admirals chosen by those systems are selected by the president to positions to make those calls, that they are men of ability and honor who will do the right thing, and that they, in turn, will continue to select the right men to constitute the groups which actually control the process.