We posed this question to Dr Bill Proud...

The vehicles are generally moving along the road at some speed, say 30 miles an hour. The article you’re trying to cause to explode is buried underground so you have to make sure that the waves can actually reach into the explosive, and all of this has got to happen in the millisecond or so that you've got in front of the vehicle.  So you need a huge amount of power and you can't mount that much power and drive it down the road, basically baking the road in front of you to the required temperature.  Also, think about what would happen to the wildlife and the general ecology around us as we’re sending out that much power.

We posed this question to Dr Graham McShane...

Well, when a blast pulse hits a surface, some fraction of that blast pulse will reflect off of that surface.  Depending on the geography of the area, the properties of the surface and the size of the bomb, the blast could go around many corners.  It could follow quite a torturous route, reflecting off various surfaces.  So, it could cause damage for quite a large area. It’s all down to reflections.

We put this question to Bill Proud:

Well number one, you need a very intense bright light source.  Some people actually use explosives to do the lighting for the system! The next thing you need is a thing called a CCD, Charge Capture Device, or CMOS camera.  What you're doing is switching on high voltages, in and out very, very quickly.  So it’s high voltage pulses on a nanosecond duration with explosive as the lighting.  These can be quite destructive experiments, even if you're doing quite small scale experiments.