This naturally has triggered a hailstorm of scorn, the threat of economic sanctions by the United States, warnings of a boycott of the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer and mobilization by some of the more rabid environmental groups to disrupt the hunt.
Norway, in fact, will find few friends to support its cause because it is popularly believed to be on the wrong side of one of the more emotionally charged environmental issues of our time. The popular view, however, is the misguided one, cluttered with simplistic, irrational and arrogant thinking.
Whales, like dolphins, evoke deep and reverent sympathy from many people because they are highly developed marine animals. And there is no question that whaling practices of the past became a profligate disgrace, ravaging the populations of many of these splendid animals to near extinction.
In response, the whaling commission imposed a ban on all commercial whaling in 1986, allowing the taking of only a few whales by a few nations for research purposes - a loophole widely perceived as appeasement of the whaling countries. the purpose of the ban was to stabilize and restore whale populations, and to someday allow resumption of limited, carefully monitored commercial hunting of the most abundant.
It worked well, and the logical course today would be to protect those species most in peril while carefully relaxing the ban on those with healthy stock. But what should have remained a scientific issue has become a moral and political one, and the rallying cry of "save the whales" has been transmuted into "save all the whales in all their number for all time".
This is an easy position worth easy environmental points for countries like the United States, where whaling has become an anachronism. But for countries whose cultures are intertwined with whaling, and the eating of whale meat, it is another matter.
Such is the case with Norway, Iceland and Japan, which have grown frustrated with the politicization of the whaling commission and the presumptiveness of other countries in imposing their values on them - without scientific justification. They obeyed the commission's restrictions in good faith, but were rebuffed when they sought a limited lifting of the ban on small minke whales, estimated now at about 1 million.
Iceland quit the fight and the commission a year ago. Norway now is going its own way, restricting itself to 296 minke whales out of an estimated population of 86,700 in its waters. Japan was humiliated in its own homeland when the commission - at its recent annual meeting in Kyoto - refused to allow traditional whalers in four coastal villages to "take" 50 minkes out of an estimated 760,000 in Japanese fishing waters.
Opponents argue that cracking the door on the ban will lead to heavy commercial whaling. But that is a classic red-herring tactic of exaggerating to protect the agenda; in reality, the commission would set biologically sound limits and enforce compliance.
The true risk, if the Commission continues to be obstinate, is that nations such as Norway, Iceland and Japan all will go their own way, and become rogues of the sea setting their own rules. If the United States truly cares about this issue, it will work with those countries, respecting their cultures and the need to manage whales with science, not ideology.