General :: [bash] Output Of One Script Is Input Of Another?

Now, I have one script called "defcon" defcon gets the current DEFCON level and outputs it using echo.

Code:

#!/bin/bash
DEFCON=`curl -s http://members.tripod.com/~Swat_25/defcon.html | sed -n '/^$/!{s/<[^>]*>//g;p;}' | sed '/^$/d' | grep '[12345]$'`
echo "The current DEFCON level is $DEFCON"

The second script ("tweet") updates my twitter account.

Code:

#!/bin/bash
curl -s -u USER:PASS -d status="$@" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml > /dev/null

What I want to do is be able to update my twitter account with the current defcon status (this is really more of a learning thing than something I actually want to be doing). The original script for tweet replaced $@ with $1, but if I use:

tweet `defcon`

it only uses the first word in the string, similarly if I used $2 or $3.So I changed it to $@. The normal function still works, but typing:

tweet `defcon`

updates twitter with nothing.

EDIT I should mention the /dev/null is there to catch the output of curl, otherwise it won't run silently. It still updates twitter normally with the send to /dev/null