  We present a general framework to explore thermally activated failures in
quasi one dimensional systems. We apply it to the collapse of carbon nanotubes,
the formation of bottlenecks in nanowires, both of which limit conductance, and
the opening of local regions or "bubbles" of base pairs in strands of DNA that
are relevant for transcription and danaturation. We predict an exponential
behavior for the probability of the opening of bubbles in DNA, the average
distance between flattened regions of a nanotube or necking in a nanowire as a
monotonically decreasing function of temperature, and compute a temperature
below which these events become extremely rare. These findings are difficult to
obtain numerically, however, they could be accessible experimentally.
