Amid Greenpeace protests against the weapons in front of the German foreign ministry, Greens leader Claudia Roth told the daily Berliner Zeitung that the missiles were a relict of the Cold War.

"They should be withdrawn and destroyed," she said.

An estimated 150 atomic weapons are stationed on German soil out of a total of about 480 in Europe. In a case of self-defense after a nuclear attack, they would be carried by German Tornado jets under current pacts.

The foreign affairs spokesman for Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats, Gert Weisskirchen, told the paper that Washington could "send a message in Russia's direction to revive the non-proliferation process" with a full withdrawal.

And the leader of the liberal opposition Free Democrats, Guido Westerwelle, said the nuclear weapons in Europe were futile because they were all relatively short-range and would only be able to target states that are allies today.

He urged Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, who is in New York for an international meeting to review the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to call on Washington to withdraw the weapons.

Members of the environmentalist group Greenpeace on Monday erected a six-meter-tall (20-foot-tall) mock nuclear weapon in front of the foreign ministry in Berlin demanding Germany's complete withdrawal from what it called "the nuclear war scenario."

Greenpeace spokesman Wolfgang Lohbeck said Germany was in violation of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) because it would aid in a counter-attack by providing aircraft and pilots to the United States in the case of a nuclear strike.

The conference at the United Nations beginning Monday is aimed at overhauling the NPT, which went into effect in 1970.

Since the treaty was signed the world faces a new era of "rogue" states, international nuclear smuggling rings, and trans-national terrorist groups seeking weapons of mass destruction.

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