March 26, 1983

President Reagan said today that he had decided to seek development of an advanced missile-defense system because it was ''inconceivable'' for the United States and the Soviet Union to continue indefinitely to threaten each other with nuclear destruction. Mr. Reagan, at a news conference at the White House, said the Soviet Union and the United States had become ''like people facing themselves across a table, each with a cocked gun, and no one knowing whether someone might tighten their finger on the trigger.'' He acknowledged that the situation had prevented one side from attacking the other for decades. But he said he thought ''there is another way'' that peace might be preserved - for scientists to ''turn their talent to the job of perhaps coming up with something that would render these weapons obsolete.''

A Presidential panel has authorized the Army Corps of Engineers to seek major changes in the law protecting the nation's wetlands. Page 8. WASHINGTON, March 25 - The Reagan Administration announced the resignations today of five senior officials of the Environmental Protection Agency, including Acting Administrator John W. Hernandez Jr. The chairmen of all the House subcommittees investigating the agency's conduct said after the announcement that they intended to proceed with their inquiries.

In the latest of a series of charges that have created the impression abroad that Nicaragua is under siege, the Sandinist Government said today that Honduran troops entered its territory Thursday but were driven back after an exchange of gunfire. (In Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, a Foreign Ministry spokesman termed the Nicaraguan accusation ''totally false.'' Page 3.) Protest at the U.N. The charge against Honduras followed Nicaragua's protest this week to the United Nations Security Council that United States-backed exile bands based in Honduras had stepped up their incursions into this country. In addition, the armed opposition has claimed to have captured several Nicaraguan villages. Yet despite their increasing military actions in the last few months, rebel bands appear to have attracted little public support in Nicaragua, according to the evidence available to reporters here. This is believed to be because of the Honduran-based rebels' identification with the unpopular national guard of the Government of Anastasio Somoza Debayle, which the Sandinists overthrew in 1979.

New York City's Board of Education is discussing ways to limit the powers of the next Chancellor and expand its own authority over the city's public school system, the board president said yesterday. ''We're assessing the priorities, reassessing where emphasis should be, reassessing where we can get a tighter situation than what we have now in certain areas,'' the board president, Joseph G. Barkan, said in a telephone interview from his vacation home in Florida. It has been years since a board has so aggressively considered asserting its authority over the city's public school system, which, with a budget of more than $3 billion, nearly a million students and a staff of 100,000, 55,000 of them teachers, is the largest in the nation. It is happening now, many board members say, because they have been so overshadowed by the last Chancellor, Frank J. Macchiarola.

France's Socialist Government adopted a tough austerity package today in a bid to resolve its economic crisis. Included were a limit on the amount of money that tourists can take abroad and a ''forced loan'' that most income tax payers will have to make to the Government. The package is intended to reduce consumer spending this year by 65 billion francs, or $9 billion, the equivalent of 2 percent of France's gross national product, the annual output of all goods and services. Such a cutback was aimed at restoring confidence in the franc by reducing inflation as well as the nation's huge trade deficit.