An examination of the time to failure for uniaxial tensile specimens of some 50 materials, measured in some cases over ten decades of time, has suggested a universal rate relation between lifetime, stress, and temperature of the form τ = τ0 exp [(U0 - γσ)/kT]. The constant τ0 is essentially the reciprocal of the natural oscillation frequency of atoms in the solid, U0 is the binding energy on the atomic scale, and γ is proportional to the disorientation of the molecular structure. Assuming the kinetic nature of bond destruction through the thermofluctuation mechanism, direct experimental verification of the phenomenon for polymers has been obtained using electron paramagnetic resonance.