Bitterness of this fueled a lot of ideological tensions. I was also taught that a large motivation of dropping the Bomb was to scare the Russians.
Source: My Highschool education. Obviously, commentary on WWII is not objective, but I stand by my thesis, considering the actual action that the United States engages in in present times. Its in our history to be both ideologically driven and meta gamers.
"The North African front was basically secure while Stalingrad was happening"
That doesn't make any sense. Operation Torch (the Allied invasion of Morocco and Algeria) didn't even start until Nov 8th, and Montgomery's position in Libya was hardly "secure" before November. But the Soviets were already launching counter-offensives and encircling the German army by the end of November. If you're counting from the beginning of the main Stalingrad offensives, August 1942, yeah maybe you could call the North African theater "stable", if by stable you mean that the Allies just one a defensive victory and managed to stall out an offensive into Egypt. But it's not like they could cancel their planned invasion of Algeria and Morocco and re-plan for an invasion of France in a couple months.
Plus the US would be invading mainland Europe Sept 3rd of 1943, and I really don't think they could have performed a successful invasion anytime sooner.
We spend so much human talent on defense, and sure we got a bunch of great technologies, but who's to say that we wouldn't have got them through some other avenue, later? Or perhaps even better technologies. I only speculate about the former, but I am quite certain a lot of the violence in the world has been caused by American Neo-colonialism and the terrorism we imposed upon the world. I am a betting man, and I bet that if we didn't fuck the Russians over so hard in WW2, that we wouldn't have had the cold war.