Five Nato states plan to call for the removal of all remaining US nuclear weapons on European soil in a move intended to spur global disarmament, officials said today.

Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Norway and Luxembourg will make a joint declaration "in the next few weeks", a Belgian official said, with the intention of influencing a growing debate within Nato over the usefulness of nuclear weapons in alliance strategy.

The office of the Belgian prime minister, Yves Leterme, issued a statement saying: "The Belgian government wants to seize the chance provided by the US president's call for a world without nuclear weapons."

Official figures are not published, but there are thought to be between 150 and 240 "tactical" nuclear weapons in Europe, in the form of aerial bombs. Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands have 10-20 each, but most are stockpiled at US bases in Italy (70-90) and in Turkey (50-90).

Italy and Turkey have made no public statements on the weapons on their soil since Barack Obama's call last April for the eventual abolition of nuclear arms.

Russia is estimated to have 4,000 tactical weapons in its arsenal, but many proponents of disarmament argue that the short-range weapons on both sides are militarily obsolete, since the end of the cold war. They point out that the US and Russia can reach each other with inter-continental ballistic missiles in minutes while the tactical gravity bombs take hours – if not days or weeks in Turkey's case – to be loaded on to planes and flown to their targets.

It is unclear, however, whether Rome and Ankara will fight to keep the bombs as the embodiment of America's nuclear umbrella. Some east European Nato members are opposed to their removal for the same reason.

"Denied the protection of Nato's nuclear weapons in Europe, Turkey would have additional reasons to worry about Iran's nuclear programme – and perhaps to develop nuclear weapons of its own. Newer Nato members in central Europe, who see in the nuclear weapons a symbol of US commitment to defend them, would be left feeling vulnerable," George Robertson, a former defence secretary and Nato secretary general, argued in an article he co-authored this month for the Centre for European Reform.

Nato officials are due to meet in Washington tomorrow, and in Rome next week, to discuss the future role of nuclear weapons in the alliance's "new strategic concept", which is due to be decided this year.

Des Browne, another former defence secretary who now runs a "top level group" of other ex-ministers and former generals to push for disarmament, said the five-country initiative was "a very welcome addition to the debate … it's further evidence that senior European politicians are moving to the view that we can reduce the salience of these weapons and still retain our security."

Browne is due to take a delegation of European politicians to Washington next week to argue the cause of disarmament before Congress, which will have to approve any steps the Obama administration takes to reduce America's reliance on nuclear weapons.