James Warburg, member of the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, testified before the committee on March 28, 1952 and observed that the Soviet proposal might be a bluff, but it seemed "that our government is afraid to call the bluff for the fear that it may not be a bluff at all" and might lead to "a free, neutral, and demilitarized Germany", which might be "subverted into Soviet orbit". This led to an exchange of notes between the Western allies and the Soviet Union, which eventually ended after the Western allies' insistence that a unified Germany should be free to join the European Defence Community and be rearmed, a demand which Stalin rejected.