"That would be an act of desperation but I'm not going to let them take them back to Japan and put them on trial for piracy," he said.
Watson said Japan's whaling authorities had refused to release the men until he agreed to stop disrupting the hunt, and vowed he would not bow to "terrorist" tactics.
The Sea Shepherd founder has been accused of refusing to agree to their return in order to drag out the drama for publicity purposes, but he told Australian radio he welcomed the possibility of the government picking them up.
"That is fine. We just want to get them off that boat," he said.
Australia, which is one of the strongest critics of Japanese whaling, last week sent the Oceanic Viking to the area to monitor the operation and gather evidence for a possible international legal case against the whalers.
"The key challenge is how do we bring about the end of commercial whaling, period, into the future -- that's what I'm concerned about," Rudd said. "This is not scientific whaling -- this is commercial whaling."
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