  We investigate the behaviour of a finite chain of Brownian particles,
interacting through a pairwise potential $U$, with one end of the chain fixed
and the other end pulled away, in the limit of slow pulling speed and small
Brownian noise. We study the instant when and the place where the chain
"breaks", that is, the distance between two neighbouring particles becomes
larger than a certain threshold. We assume $U$ to be attractive and strictly
convex up to the break distance, and three times continuously differentiable.
We consider the regime, where both the pulling and the noise significantly
influence the distribution of the break time and break position. It turns out
that in this regime there is a universality of both the break time distribution
and the break position distribution, in the sense that the limiting quantities
do not depend on the details of $U$, but only on its curvature at the break
distance.
