France said Friday it had begun to reduce its own arsenal long before US President Barack Obama called for a "world without nuclear weapons", as a leaked memo showed Paris unimpressed by his speech.

According to the daily Le Figaro, President Nicolas Sarkozy's foreign policy advisers were dismissive of Obama's call for an end to the arms race, which he made to a cheering crowd of supporters in Prague on Sunday.

In a memo for the president, the team said US nuclear policy had moved on little from the era of Obama's predecessor George W. Bush and that the speech was the "export version, designed to burnish the image of the US abroad."

According to a leaked version of the text, cited by the paper, Sarkozy's advisers noted that while France had halted nuclear testing in 1996, the US Senate has thus far held up Washington's approval of a test ban treaty.

They also criticised delays in US strategic disarmament talks with Russia and said Obama's ideas to reinforce non-proliferation measures — such as the creation of global nuclear fuel bank — had been kicking around for a while.

"Let's leave the theology to one side and work seriously on disarmament," the memo said, dismissing Obama's optimistic rhetoric, according to Le Figaro.

Foreign ministry spokesman Eric Chevallier would not address the leaked memo directly, but in a lengthy response to reporters made it clear France had not waited for Obama's speech before taking disarmament seriously.

"France was the first country to sign and ratify the test ban treaty and the only officially nuclear-armed state to have dismantled its test centres," Chevallier said, in response to questions on the French memo.

"We're the only state to have precisely confirmed its number of warheads. We have dismantled our plants for making weapons-grade fissile material … and we've reduced our force posture," he added.

France also poured cold water on the idea that disarmament measures by declared nuclear powers would aid non-proliferation work by persuading rogue states and terrorist groups to drop their own weapons programmes.

"We don't believe there's a link between disarmament and the proliferation question," the spokesman said.

France has an estimated 300 nuclear weapons, a much smaller arsenal than Russia or the United States, but more than the other declared and presumed nuclear powers, China, Britain, Israel, Pakistan, India and North Korea.

Sarkozy pledged last year to cut back France's nuclear stockpile, but remains committed to retaining an independent deterrent based on four ballistic missile submarines and several dozen jet fighter-bombers.

earlier related report

German FM wants US nuclear arms out of country

German Foreign Minister Frank Walter Steinmeier wants the remaining US nuclear weapons in his country to be removed as they are obsolete, a magazine reported Friday.

According to the issue of Der Speigel due to go on sale Monday the weapons are "militarily obsolete" and "should be withdrawn from Germany" in the view of Steinmeier, a Social Democrat minister in the ruling coalition

"The withdrawal of this kind of weapon should be a theme at the forthcoming disarmament conference proposed by the United States," the magazine quotes Steinmeier as saying.

His remarks follow a speech in Prague by US President Barack Obama in which he suggested that efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation should be relaunched with the aim of achieving a world "without nuclear weapons".

Steinmeier's remarks also coincide with the traditional Easter demonstrations in which for more than 30 years anti-nuclear protestors have shown their opposition to nuclear weapons.

The United States pulled most of their nuclear weapons out of Europe in the 1990s when the Cold War ended.

But Der Spiegel says that about 100 are still positioned in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey. Germany has never been a nuclear power.

In a statement Friday Steinmeier welcomed moves by Washington and Moscow in the field of disarmament.

"For the first time in years we have today the chance to find a new point of departure for international disarmament," he said.

"We welcome and support the recent declarations by Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitri Medvedev (of Russia) with a view to a massive reduction in their nuclear arsenals", he added.

He called on the US Senate to ratify the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty, saying that it would make possible the relaunch of multilateral disarmament negotiations.

The minister also urged the United States and Russia to resolve their dispute over an anti-missile shield to be based in central Europe.

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