If the fearsomely, slenderly beautiful behemoths (they are 115 metres long but just 10 metres wide and are somehow weapons and sculptural works of art at the same time) do have such libraries, what will those libraries contain?

And what if (the columnist wrote, demanding feats of hypothetical imagination of his readers) the libraries contain works with the ethical and moral power to influence submariners' approaches to the extraordinary, martial work they are trained to do?

Now read on.

Doing lots of online swotting on nuclear submarines (so as to be an informed columnist) I have come upon towering US prose and poetry author W.S. Merwin's An Undersea Library.

"It was late in the summer of the year 2000," Merwin notes in his preface to An Undersea Library, when a senior employee with the mighty Borders book store chain contacted Merwin. The Borders' man confided that "As part of my job, I have begun selling books to the U.S. Navy bases ... and to individual crew members on carriers and subs. I'm told each Trident submarine has a small library."

"What books should I recommend to the 18- to 24-year-old crews, and their 35- to 45-year-old captains, those men responsible for the maintenance and deployment of the deadliest weapons on earth?

"Could any poem, novel, or short story cause anyone to interrupt their learned sequence of actions, once they have been ordered to launch? What words do I hope these men have read, and thought of, before they push buttons?"

Nuclear-armed Trident submarines carry Trident missiles, each with a destructive force estimated to be eight times that of the bomb exploded over Hiroshima. The spectre of nuclear massacres horrified the Borders' man and he knew, from Merwin's famous anti-Vietnam War activism, that Merwin was a kindred spirit in this.

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"It was a request that I could not help but take seriously," Merwin records, going on to write a short, brilliant, musing essay about literature's possible power and likely powerlessness before listing his five books and five poems and explaining his choices of them.

While Australia's nuclear submarines will not be nuclear armed, they are to bristle with devastating armaments activated by pushings of buttons. And in any case, the Undersea Library story is fascinating for all sorts of reasons including and especially the idea (surely nave?) that powerfully humane literature might have the power to stop those trained to kill from doing the killing they're ordered to do.

All of us who truly, deeply love fine novels and fine poetry and who can testify to ways in which our reading of them humanises, influences, even transforms us, have an inkling of the impossible dream the Borders' man and Merwin were wistfully daring to dream.

Readers will need to go online to Undersea Library to read all of Merwin's choices. One of them is Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, something many of you will have read, chosen for "the pain and sweetness of that book and its hilarious enchantment".

And Merwin's overall methodology is glimpsed in his first choice, a volume of Anton Chekhov's short stories.

"Russian," Merwin reflects, "and yet not, certainly, the Russian of news coverage in our days."

"The gentleness, the decency, clarity, and authenticity of Chekhov himself as it comes through. The length of the stories, encouraging a reader to pick up the book, read one, set the volume down and let the fiction, those characters' hopes, losses, longings, sink in, [showing us, the reader] the kind of person [someone just like ourselves] one might be called upon to annihilate."

But wait. We already knew in our hearts and now know it for a neuroscientific fact (read all about it online in, for example, The Case For Reading Fiction) that literary fiction cultivates humanising, tenderising empathy for others in those who read it. But can a nation afford to risk cultivating deep, horrified-by-the-thought-of-killing empathy in the bosoms of its warriors?

Merwin dwells on this conundrum in his Undersea Library.

"Would literature - and by extension the arts, the imagination - not be seen as subversive and dangerous? Would superior officers like the idea that the seaman sitting in front of the button was pondering the immeasurable value of any life?"