The intention was for Gandhi to be peaceful to a fault. That the famous Indian leader would be near impossible to anger, to reflect his famous passive resistance philosophy. In Civilization, hostility was handled on a ten point scale, and to reflect Gandhi’s pacifism his hostility would hover at around one or two on the scale.
The problem for Civilization players was, however, that if they caused global hostility to reduce all at once, Gandhi’s hostility would drop below the lowest measure on the scale. And because the game didn’t handle negative integers, Gandhi’s hostility rating wrapped around to the other end of the scale – and it didn’t land on back on 10. It wrapped around and made its way to 255, and Nuclear Gandhi was born.
Source: IGN Video Games