>>23425793
I don't want to get political in this nice space colony thread, but you've forgotten of what it is a symbol: a murderous first strike.
The US take Pearl Harbor because that's the initial & showy first strike against themselves.
China was already at war so Nanking would be more the symbol of the horror done by Japan.

In the fictional case of Gundam the numbers are just plain ridiculous if you take them seriously.
"Zeon(/Fed) killed half of mankind in one week, nuking dozens of space colonies into lifeless gigantic hulk but please pretend to only care and hate them for the last colony they dropped to decapitate the Federation."

Even if you made half of those deaths the fault of the Federation also spamming nukes, it would still be a first strike from Zeon and the colony drop would be relegated as a closure event, like the nuking of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, not a start.
Space Putin would say:
"We had to try to decapitate the evil Federation before they nuke any more of our precious colonies (we obviously dropped an evacuated one, as our history book will show)"

So that's clear cases of absurd numbers that have to be ignored/retconned to make it into the intended analogy.
Btw, the crater is also ridiculously large, the Vredefort crater was made by an asteroid ten times bigger and inevitably a hundred time more massive than an empty colony.