In 2012, TV Tropes user Tunafish edited the site's page for the Civilization series to claim that Gandhi can become the most aggressive character in the original game due to a rollover error. World leaders' aggression levels drop by two points upon adopting democracy; because Gandhi's aggression is set to 1, the lowest possible value, the pacification allegedly lowers it to -1, which defaults to 255, the highest possible value.

Despite the edit not providing any evidence, the claim nonetheless circulated online in subsequent years. Because leaders will vehemently pursue a nuclear weapons policy when their aggression is high enough, the claim spawned the "Nuclear Gandhi" meme among Civilization fans, poking fun at the apparent dissonance between the real Gandhi's pacifism and his fictional counterpart's apocalyptic jingoism. A KnowYourMeme page on the memes further distorted the rumors by claiming that the bug first appeared in Civilization II rather than the first game; as of March 2024, the page now acknowledges that the rumors are false.

The Nuclear Gandhi claim was eventually debunked by series creator Sid Meier in his 2020 autobiography, Sid Meier's Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games. In the book, Meier revealed that Civilization and Civilization II are respectively programmed in C and C++, which are immune to the kinds of rollover errors that the urban legend describes. Consequently, Gandhi's aggression level remains at 1 after the adoption of democracy. Nevertheless, Meier admitted that he found the memes surrounding the urban legend funny.